The Cellar - View Single Post - Products to avoid as if your life depends on it.

Clodfobble · 02-15-2010, 05:37 PM

I saw something the other day that's got to be one of the worst ideas for humanity ever.

So there are these websites (there are several, but I won't even link to any of them) that sell various high-dollar items under a modified "auction" setup. The price starts at basically nothing, and each bid bumps the price incrementally by 10 cents. BUT, it costs a dollar to bid, and every bid adds 30 seconds to the auction time to give everyone else a chance to respond.

So let's say you've got a group of people bidding on a new PS3, with a starting price of $5. If the final closing price is as low as $75--which is of course far less than retail value--that means the website actually got paid a total of $700, a dollar for every dime bid all the way up. And there are dozens of schleps who paid who-knows-how-much for their bids and didn't win the item.

But here's where the real schadenfreude comes in: there is a list of everyone who has bid on an item, and how many times. In just a few minutes of wandering around this site, we found an auction where there were basically only two primary bidders left going back and forth over an electronics item whose actual worth was about $300. The auction value was slightly over $200... and each of these guys had bid over 200 times each. So no matter what, one of them was going to pay more than $100 over the retail price, and the other was going to pay hundreds for nothing. Neither of them was going to walk away from it. It's like you can watch people's lives being ruined right in front of you, 30 seconds at a time.

02-15-2010, 05:37 PM	#14
Clodfobble UNDER CONDITIONAL MITIGATION Join Date: Mar 2004 Location: Austin, TX Posts: 20,012	I saw something the other day that's got to be one of the worst ideas for humanity ever. So there are these websites (there are several, but I won't even link to any of them) that sell various high-dollar items under a modified "auction" setup. The price starts at basically nothing, and each bid bumps the price incrementally by 10 cents. BUT, it costs a dollar to bid, and every bid adds 30 seconds to the auction time to give everyone else a chance to respond. So let's say you've got a group of people bidding on a new PS3, with a starting price of $5. If the final closing price is as low as $75--which is of course far less than retail value--that means the website actually got paid a total of $700, a dollar for every dime bid all the way up. And there are dozens of schleps who paid who-knows-how-much for their bids and didn't win the item. But here's where the real schadenfreude comes in: there is a list of everyone who has bid on an item, and how many times. In just a few minutes of wandering around this site, we found an auction where there were basically only two primary bidders left going back and forth over an electronics item whose actual worth was about $300. The auction value was slightly over $200... and each of these guys had bid over 200 times each. So no matter what, one of them was going to pay more than $100 over the retail price, and the other was going to pay hundreds for nothing. Neither of them was going to walk away from it. It's like you can watch people's lives being ruined right in front of you, 30 seconds at a time. __________________ My book My other book My spirit animal