AMERICA returned to work yesterday after the long holiday weekend, but for an estimated 60 million employees there was no let-up in the traditional Thanksgiving shopping binge.

“Cyber Monday” is fast becoming the busiest online shopping day of the year, with a third of the US workforce expected to log on to shopping websites from their work computer after scouting for products in conventional stores over the weekend.

Analysts have identified a more general trend towards Monday cybershopping that presents employers with a dilemma: whether to block the most popular retail sites or turn a blind eye.

“Black Friday — the day after Thanksgiving — is the ceremonial kick-off of the Christmas shopping season but the online kick-off is definitely Monday,” said Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org, which coined the term Cyber Monday. He said there were two groups of cybershoppers. “People will go out and shop with friends and family and they won’t get around to buying everything they were planning to buy, or they get some ideas and later confirm that it was something they wanted. The second group are people who don’t want to battle the crowds out in the streets and they feel more efficient shopping online.”

Americans spent $144 million (£84 million) online on Thanksgiving Thursday and $305 million on Black Friday, so-called because shops hope to go from the red to the black. Last year shoppers spent $380 million on Cyber Monday, a figure expected to rise this year by 20 per cent.

Online shopping companies such as qvc.com have observed that Monday tends to be the busiest day of the week. That may be because work computers are usually faster — and cheaper — to run than home computers, but researchers have found that the growth of home broadband has failed to dent office cybershopping.

ComScore Networks, a consumer behaviour analyst, found that home high-speed internet connections rose by 25 per cent over the past year in the US, but the proportion of customers using their work computer for shopping only dropped from 59 to 58 per cent. Visa said that its customers spent $3.4 billion in stores over the weekend, and $544 million on e-commerce.

Some bosses believe that a ten-minute surf in the office is better than an hour at the shops. Bob Dobkin, of Pepco, an electric company in Washington, said: “We think it’s productive if they do that instead of running out and stretching the one-hour lunch into two.”

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