There's a famous Pieter Bruegel painting from 1562 called "The Triumph of Death" that someone contrasted with a "typical scene in a US department store on Black Friday" here[1].

It might take a few seconds to tell apart the painting from the Black Friday store. ;-)

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The original painting[2] has a gem[3] in the corner of it (that's not visible in[1]): where death is wreaking havoc, and a pair of lovers, oblivious to it, are playing guitar and singing. In that frame, you'll see death also playing guitar right behind them, in a neat visual rhyme, implying that their fate is sealed too.

[1] https://www.devblog.no/sites/devblog.no/files/styles/800px_w...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triumph_of_Death

[3] You have to zoom into the lower right corner to see it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triumph_of_Death#/media/Fi...

Having worked in the bowels of a major online retailers networking team during black Friday sales, I can say that a lot of the patterns you see in this UI are real. People do indeed get out of bed at ungodly hours of the morning to get two bucks knocked off a stereo.

Check out your console some easter eggs. Pretty cool!!!

Also that is a ton of data polled like every second. 68 deep array of objects. impressive would be cool to read about their backend

As everyone who ever worked in geo-based databases, I wasn't suprised at the dots at "Null Island" at 0°N 0°E. But funny nevertheless.

The bounding shape of Michigan is so fucked xD, https://elixi.re/i/mf4eb.png

Gosh I've really enjoyed using the Shop Pay checkout experience on an increasingly large number of ecommerce sites this past few months. It didn't really click until recently that this was all Shopify backed!

Makes me think it might not be too late to figure out a sensible valuation for NYSE:SHOP and invest.

Judging by the globe there's a similar amount of traffic in the west coast US as there is in UK, which is a bit odd considering its 0715 here in the UK right now. I didn't know my neighbors got up to shop so early.

Is the name "BFCM" a dark humor nod to the ICBM-like visualization?

This reminds me of the time I worked for an ecommerce firm, and one of our customers used the same backend for physical and online shopping. Systems went down due to some bug causing cpu load. People in the store couldnt pay for their goods. Many angry phone calls were had, whilst I frantically searched through the logs to find the bug.

Today is also Buy Nothing Day for those with different values.

Our mainstream culture generally says growing the GDP helps everyone, that "a rising tide lifts all boats." Some of us see the evidence pointing the other way and avoiding needless shopping helping people more.

Never got an order confirmation email for an item I just bought. Not entirely surprised.

The dashboard has a tracker for carbon removal. If shopify really wanted to do something about that they'd close shop for 4 days (BF-CM), that'll have a much bigger impact than compensating for shipping.

towels down 35%? are people dirtier since lockdown? xD

on serious note, pretty cool visualization!

wow, now I want to see that for Amazon in real time globally!

Wait some people still have money to spend?

No action in the Nordics, fascinating.

anyone know how that globe is made? which library ?

Slightly off topic but I am always surprised Shopify hasn't every created something akin to the amazon homepage that allows you to browse and find items at shopify stores more seamlessly.

As Retailer on Shopify I want to say:

It bugs me the Shopify engineering team are spending their time making gimmicks like this rather than improving their platform. (Which is lacking features, buggy and requires you to install about 15 different addons just to function…

When envrionmanetal alarmist cancel Black Friday?

is it written in ruby?

This is a very clear illustration of the inequalities between the northern and southern hemisphere’s.

I'll never respect Shopify. I gave them my CV with decent experience and the recruiter never even spoke to me on the phone. They told me that I would need more of a social media presence or maybe open-source work. It was completely baffling but I'm glad I never encountered another company like them.

Perhaps this is off topic, but it's always strange to see writing thousands of kilometers. If we're gonna use the meric system let's commit to it: either write megameters or millions of meters.

It's a very cool visualization in any case.

You can do this with the Shop mobile app (it's an official Shopify product). I think stores are defaulted to showing up but they have are able to opt out.

I've wanted this exact same thing. I've used `site:myshopify.com item` to search via Shopify URL pattern in Google

We were surprised by this as well, but since one didn't exist, we started to create one!

https://vendazzo.com/

We still have a long ways to go, but you can search for items and filter based on things like category and distance (if you are trying to shop locally). We're doing things on a very tight budget at the moment, so sometimes the site goes down, but we're working on it :)

If you have any feedback, we would love to hear it.

Seems like you would also take a lot of responsibility for the negative experiences from that pathway.

Store scams someone and Shopify takes the hit.

No website but check out the Shop app on your phone. Kind of does that. I also really enjoy the product tracking.

They did/do this. One of the big problems is competing with customers. i.e. you go from being a platform (Windows, Unity, Shopify, etc) to an aggregator (Amazon, Spotify, Instagram, etc) and your relationship goes from the small store to Shopify. Similar to how you might browse Doordash for "food", rather than look specifically for "Chipotle".

Upside of an aggregator is discovery/distribution. Downside is you rely on the aggregator for that discovery/distribution.

Rare for billion dollar businesses to be built on aggregators, not so rare for them to be built on platforms.

Despite using the same platform, no two companies setup their product catalogs the same way, from how multiple products/colorways are grouped together to metafields are used to communicate more nuanced product features. There's simply no way Shopify could hope to present a unified catalog given those implementation nuances.

Why would anyone want to filter by that though? I should not want to purchase from people who use a different payment processor?

Wouldn’t it be a huge risk in some ways? People don’t know site xyz is Shopify until they’re on xyz and therefore probably have no qualms with Shopify hosting xyz. If it were a marketplace, someone “just browsing” would find something that offends their oh-so-delicate sensibilities and the next day some grotesque exaggeration like “Shopify supports terrorists” or “Shopify is pro/anti-abortion” leads the headline news.

Not strange at all. Kilometers is a unit of distance that we are familiar with.

I have literally never heard the term “megameter” used in conversation and I’m pretty sure if you said it in any metric country you would get blank stares.

My lab scale shows me grams to the thousandth (the accuracy is only to the hundredths). Would you have it show me 7000mg instead? What about 17000mg?

I think it’s much better to pick a unit that makes the most sense for the bulk of your readings and abuse it instead of changing units on me. Imagine if it went from 999mg to 1g, now imagine it trying to settle between them. Or you are weighing a dozen items that are all expected to have a weight of about 1g and need to log the results - think of the unnecessary cognitive overhead the changing units would cause.

Kilometres is the 'native' unit for normal people thinking about driving, flying or shipping in most metric countries (obviously pilots and sailors use different units, like nautical miles, but for regular passengers it's km).

All road signs, the distance indicator on the entertainment system in planes, etc. are always set out like that (e.g. 1617 km to Cairns, or 11,980 km to Dubai).

From my point of view (whole life in a country that is exclusively metric), it would be really strange to see this kind of distance written in millions of metres or megametres. Would feel totally unintuitive.

A lot of people really struggle with both large numbers and changes in units.

Our current system is basically the social consensus of what is easiest.

I think for large monetary units, newspapers and reporters should always use millions. Ask a guy off the street, what's larger, $500 million or $2 billion? I bet most get it wrong. That infrastructure bill that just passed? 1.2 million millions. How rich is Jeff Bezos? 200 thousand millions. The total US national debt? 29 million millions. Say it that way and it actually sounds like a large number.

Why should there be consistency/commitment? Other than for the sake of itself? Genuinely curious where this desire for things being the way they 'should' be comes from