Stores tempt shoppers with Cyber Monday deals — but beware hackers

Las Vegas employers likely lost some money on Cyber Monday due to lost productivity.

If every employee in Las Vegas spent 20 minutes at their workplaces Monday browsing online cyber deals, that will translate to an estimated $6.8 million in unproductive wages, according to workplace expert Andy Challenger.

“It’s impossible for employers to combat that,” said Challenger, who is vice president of Chicago-based jobs firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas Inc.

Shoppers were expected to spend $6.6 billion on Cyber Monday, up more than 16 percent from a year ago, according to Adobe Analytics, the research arm of software maker Adobe.

Even if some employers blocked certain online shopping sites, it didn’t do much good.

“Everybody’s got a machine in their pocket, disconnected from an employer’s network, that is pinging them alerts all day about sales,” Challenger said.

Web traffic from smartphones and tablets was expected to top desktop computers for the first time this year, Adobe said.

“These companies that are promoting online shopping are getting better and better all the time at drawing you to their sites,” Challenger said, and this year retailers are rolling out even more promotions for Cyber Monday, hoping to keep people buying stuff on their smartphones or computers.

As part of their Cyber Monday deals, Target and Toys R Us offered 15 percent off most items on their sites. Walmart.com tripled the amount of items available for sale compared to last year. And Amazon — which Bain & Co. expects to capture 50 percent of all online sales growth — offered similar deals on its gadgets as it did on Black Friday, but offered new deals on Lego sets and Hasbro games.

For employers who caught their employees shopping, Challenger has some advice: Let it go.

“Part of the world we live in today is that barriers between home life and work life have really started to dissolve. You’re expected to answer emails at 9:00 at night, first thing you do in the morning is check your phone,” he said. “So, while the work life is moving into the home space, employers have to be cognizant that more personal actives are going to take place in the work atmosphere. And that means allowing people to do some of their shopping on Amazon during the workday.”

All that shopping is good news for retailers —and for hackers.

Darrell Arms, executive director of technology solutions at Las Vegas-based Link Technologies, an information technology consulting firm, said now is the best time of year to be a hacker.

The busiest day for shopping online also means the hardest day to catch somebody trying to steal information, Arms said.

“The chances of being discovered are a lot less than they’d usually be.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report. Contact Nicole Raz at nraz@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4512. Follow @JournalistNikki on Twitter.