Black Friday

Yesterday was the first day of Amazon's Black Friday promotion, every hour on the hour between 7am and 9pm they release 3 items which are sometimes heavily discounted, sometimes not so much.  There is limited stock so you have to click pretty fast to get one, I managed to get Photoshop Elements 9 for Uwe at £22.99, Scrabble Trickster at £9.99 for my step Dad who pretty much always comes last at scrabble but this version has cheat cards and 3 Nigella Lawson books for £15, the original price for the set was £81, but individually they could be bought for about £40 so even still it was a bargain.  Unfortunately I missed out on the Wii for £50... £50!! There were some lucky people who must have been very happy with that.

As with anything there were a lot of losers moaning about it being a farce, and even one person spamming Amazon message boards saying that everyone that said they got a bargain was lying and an Amazon employee because no one he knew managed it.  I find it quite amusing how people don't think outside their little bubbles, there are more than 60 million people living in the UK, if 1% of them decided to try for an Amazon bargain that would still be 600,000 people clicking add to basket when the offer starts of course not everyone is going to be able to get the item.  Some people are saying Amazon must have only had 5 items of each product, but even with 10,000 items - with a 1.6% chance per customer - they would still be gone within one minute by this system.

The one criticism I have with the whole process is that some people decide they are going to click the 'add to basket' button regardless without looking at the price that pops up at the very same time, this results in them dismissing it later which means that someone who actually really did want the item is potentially left disappointed. The deals on Amazon.com have a waitlist option so if someone adds to their cart but dismisses it it defaults to the next in line as long as you are still browsing the site, seems like a good idea to me.

Yesterday was also a day of deliveries for me, most of my Christmas presents for people turned up and I only need to buy one more.  One of Uwe's presents was a little larger then I expected and quite heavy so not sure if I'll have much room to take clothes lol.