This is the first in a series of posts we’ll be publishing on trends we’re seeing in the retail industry and how IT organizations tasked with deploying and maintaining flawless digital customer experiences can take advantage of PagerDuty to ensure always-on reliability. It’s been a tough year for retail.

The five-day period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday is known as the Cyber Five Weekend (also known as Cyber 5). Forbes estimates that people spent $3.7 billion on Thanksgiving Day in 2018. They approximate that over 165 million people shopped over the entire weekend. This is a 16.5% increase year over year. On Black Friday, people spent $6.2 billion online, with a 23.6% year-over-year growth.