Irrelevance Glorified

…And completely redeem yourself!

So, Woot had an anniversary recently. Unbelievably, they turned 5 on July 12th. Normally, they issue a Bag of Crap, which results in their server melting down. This year, they went in a bit of a different direction. They sold Woot-Off lights. USB powered ones.

Here was their deal. Buy a set of Woot-Off lights ($3 + $5 shipping, since it’s always $5 shipping for anything on their site), and if the last digit of your order number matches the ones digit of the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the close of business on the next day (Monday the 13th), you get a lovely BoC. Their reasoning was that this way their server wouldn’t get hammered, and a lot more people would get a legitimate chance at getting a wonderous Box of Carrots. I took the plunge in hopes of scoring some of that sweet sweet Bunch of Cabbage.

But then I thought about the evil side of this. Normally, when a Boatload of Clowns shows up on their website, you get about 5 minutes to get it, and when the dust settles, they’ve sold 4500 items. Recently, they streamlined it to give away 1500 x 3 items, since there’s no reason anyone would want just one 1 piece of crap instead of 3, except for fear that the server lag from switching from “I Want One” to “I Want Three” would keep them from getting any craps. But this time, they sold 50,000 Woot-Off Lights. In other words, they had $400,000 come at them in one day. And, assuming their order numbers operate on a base-10 numbering system (oh, it would be awesome if they switched to hexadecimal on this one day), they would only have to give out 5,000 Bandoliers of Chickens. And they wouldn’t have to scrape their server off the floor with a spatula. Definitely shady. The forums were hilarious though; they were looking back over the past 3 months of stock market probability and noting the most common numbers, as if that really makes a difference.

What really made it annoying was that my number was 0…and that I was about 5 minutes away from scoring crap. At market close it was 8,331.68. So sad. And all I have to show for it are those lovely USB lights above. It makes me never want to deal with Woot again (until they have stupid crap that I actually want).

Well, to my wonderful surprise Woot e-mailed me during the week and thanked me for my order and my role in making them a success. And as a token of appreciation, they gave me two $5 coupons for future Woot orders. Sweet. Spend $8, get $10 virtual money back. Aww, Woot, you knew I was joking before, right?

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