Woot-Off!

There is a website to which I am thoroughly addicted.  It is called woot.com and I check it and it's cohorts, kids.woot.com and shirt.woot.com daily.  If you have not heard of woot, basically it sells one object a day at a significant discount to its retail asking price - many times something useless, always something random.  If you want it, you click the obnoxiously large button that says so and buy it - but you have to do it that day or it's gone.  You can't buy yesterday's item and if it sells out, that's it.  If it doesn't sell out, they put something else up the next day anyway.  What do they do with the extra things that don't sell out?

They wait.

And then they have a woot-off.  A woot-off lasts anywhere from one to three days.  The amount of time is arbitrary and chosen by them, you won't know how long the madness will last.  During a woot-off they sell one item after another (still only one at a time, though!).  When an item sells out, they put up a new one.  The woot-off items tend to be even more random and useless than the daily deals - these are the things no one wanted in the first place, remember?  And, yet, the time-sensitive pressure to buy exists.  People will purchase things they don't want or need just to keep the woot-off moving or because they have an inkling they might want it someday and this is their only chance.  It's pure madness.

And I give in every time.

All this to say: today is a woot-off on both the original Woot and Kids.Woot.

I tend to use a tracker - wooters.us is mine of choice (yes, people have devoted full websites to the Woot-Off) - rather than refreshing the page constantly throughout the day.  Wooters.us lets me know when an item has sold out and when a new one comes up (via an obnoxious dinging) and also predicts the amount of time until a certain item will sell out.

Finally, the holy grail of the woot-off - the one everyone is waiting for is called the "Random Crap." People literally watch this annoying rapid-paced-selling-of-ridiculousness for days waiting for the one moment when the "Random Crap" goes up for sale (as if it doesn't all fit under that title).  The "Random" is represented by a bag and thus generally referred to as the "Bag of Crap" or "B.O.C." It always costs $8.  It always sells out within nano-seconds.  I'm not kidding.  The reason is because of tales of those who have received large-screen T.V.s and other amazing worth-way-more-than-$8 items.  Warning: most of the items in the B.O.C.'s are not this way.  Trust me.  We've gotten two.  They're generally not worth anything more than the bragging rights that you got one.  And yet we still get excited when we get the chance.

It's pure ridiculousness.

As a side note to that: wooters. us (and other trackers) basically exists to give people a greater chance of winning the coveted B.O.C. (a prize for which we pay $8).  It has "auto-buy" which automatically clicks the "I Want One" button and takes you to the buying page.  It gives people an edge and the true woot devotees hate it.  I don't mind.


PS Kids.Woot generally tends to have some pretty quality items.  Great toys and baby gear at significant discount.  So, it's worth checking out - especially if you're buying for kids.  Many a birthday and Christmas gift have been purchased on this site - saving a lot of money (when we don't give in and buy things we don't need, that is).