Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT.N) has decided that Cyber Monday, the biggest online shopping day of the year, should not start on a Monday anymore. The world’s largest retailer by revenue will, for the first time this year, launch all its Cyber Monday deals on the Sunday after Thanksgiving rather than the early hours of Monday morning as in previous years. Cyber Monday’s origins trace back more than a decade when people started using the high-speed Internet access at their workplaces to purchase things they saw but did not buy during trips to the shopping mall over the weekend after U.S. Thanksgiving, which falls on the fourth Thursday in November. Now, with Internet access readily available, the logic of limiting the event to a weekday no longer holds, said Fernando Madeira, chief executive of Walmart.com.
