One of the Biggest Winners on Green Monday Won’t Be a Retailer

Everyone from online retailers to FedEx are hoping to be rolling in the dough by the end of today.

With only 13 days until Christmas, today has historically ranked as one of the heaviest online shopping days of the year, thereby earning the nickname “Green Monday.”

This year it’s almost a guarantee that history will repeat itself.

Already, six individual days have surpassed the billion-dollar threshold this holiday season, according to comScore. That’s up from last year, when only one day eclipsed $1 billion in spending.

The term Green Monday was coined by eBay in 2007 to describe the second Monday of December because it tended to attract shoppers who wanted to make sure their presents would arrive in time. And, well, because the color of money is green.

This year, a number of online retailers are banking on it by offering a number of holiday specials.

But one of the biggest benefactors of all is FedEx, which must ship all the orders.

The commercial postal service is predicting that today will be the busiest day in its nearly 40-year history. The company is forecasting that it will ship more than 17 million orders today, double its daily average volume, and will exceed last year’s busiest day of 15.6 million shipments.

FedEx might be one of the first indicators to reveal how well the online shopping is fairing.

It says the increase is largely driven by residential shipments sent from online and catalog retailers. ComScore’s data would agree with that hypothesis. Already, the research firm says that online shopping is up roughly 15 percent from Nov. 1 to Dec. 9, compared to the same period in 2010.

ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said, “We know that Green Monday will rank among the top online spending days of the season.”

But he added that it will likely not be the last hurrah of the year.

Other important days to come include the promotional day coined “Free Shipping Day,” which occurs on Dec. 16, and other days this week as we near the end of the year.

One retailer, however, was not in the holiday spirit.

Amazon-owned Zappos put out a press release today calling itself the Anti-Green Monday. It said shoppers don’t have to get caught up in the hype because it is guaranteeing that all orders made on Dec. 22 will receive next-day delivery for Dec. 23.

Now that’s the true definition of a procrastinator.

Here is comScore’s list of the 10 biggest shopping days of 2011:

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Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge.

— Author Tim Kreider on not getting paid for one’s work