Yes, now I don’t know this for sure but here’s what I think I know. 🙄 I think it started with the Japanese cookie/candy maker of Pocky, whose cookies look like sticks and were copied by the Korean maker of Pepero. One of them made up a “holiday” on 11-11 using the cookies as a sales gimmick and called it Singles Day. It became big and then huge, with people exchanging boxes and then gift basket assortments of Pepero and Pocky treats. By then it was spreading throughout Asia, particularly into China where one of the big internet shopping sites (Alibaba? maybe; basically, their Amazon) exploded the Singles Day concept into a shopping day of special prices like Black Friday in the US. Everyone jumped on the bandwagon. And now it’s actually the biggest monetary value shopping “day” (because like Black Friday it’s longer than one day) of the year in the world based primarily on Chinese shopping. There’s almost certainly a Wikipedia entry that tells this story correctly 🤣 but that’s how it felt like it happened at the time.
11-11-2011 was pretty huge, of course LOL. Now only 10 months until Singles Day 2019!!!