What the fa..
So, I never actually made it back to Leicester yesterday but had to go back today to pick up my stuff, bit of a waste of time really. Anyway, on my way there and back I had plenty of time to think about my next blog post, which was going to be, surprisingly enough, about driving (the M1, constant roadworks and people’s lack of ability) however, I’ve been sat here trying to find new people to follow on twitter and thinking of ways to get more people to follow me (one of which being to be more interesting! (difficult!)) and on one of the sites I was looking at, there was a silly flash banner game (the ones that tell you to shoot/hit something so many times, then it takes you to a website saying you’ve won), we all know they’re bollox and you don’t actually win anything but on the odd occasion I like to follow these links to see what they’re trying to fob people off with.
This time I was taken to a site that, on face value, looked a bit like ebay mingled in with bidup.tv and it was unusally appealing (high-spec laptops at £200? what geek wouldn’t second-take a glance?), however, after a 15 second review of the site and watching the bids slowly tick away time, I noticed something a tad, untoward, so to speak.
I noticed that every time someone was bidding on the laptop (it only had 10 seconds left to go) the timer reset back to 10 seconds, so I clicked the “How does it work” link and was shocked. Basically “buy bids, choose product, bid, win!”, seems fair enough? Yep, until you continue reading. Each bid costs you 50p (pre-paid) regardless of if you win the product or not. Each bid also increases the price of the product in pre-set increments (10p for example) AND resets the countdown timer (on timers <20 secs, ish). Lets take a little break and work this out, with an example. A foosball table was going for £10 with £0.10 increments, each bid reset the timer to 20 seconds, I sat and watched 2 people bidding on said item for about 5 minutes, raising the price from £10 to about £12.40, assuming it was only 2 people and I hadn’t missed another person, that’s 24 bids, 12 each, at 50p each, that equals £6 to each person BEFORE someone even wins it, and of course, increasing the actual purchase price by £2.40 in the process (costing the winner £8.40 extra). Now, less than £20 for a foosball table is probably a bargain but for the loser, they just wasted £6 for no reason.
Is it just me or are people too dumb to understand that they are being totally ripped off? It reminds me of these quiz shows on TV where you dial in to answer a “puzzle” like “how many bee’s are in the picture?” when the picture clearly shows (eg) 20 bees, it’s usually the wrong answer and the right one is something random like 2,030,100, during which it just cost you £100 in phone calls trying to get through to the show.
While I’m sure the owners of such shows/sites are laughing all the way to the bank (and lets face it, who wouldn’t if we had the idea first), people really need to learn to work things out before they act. Is it ignorence or are people truely too dumb to do a bit of basic maths?
I won’t mention the site or provide the url for the simple reason that I don’t agree with such obvious thievery, plus by witholding it, I’m doing the average joe a service, I could have just saved you £££’s! (all donations most welcome, thanks).
Category: Tech | Tagged: RantMay 3rd, 2009