What Is Crap?

The Epic Win that landed me a Bag o' Crap last Friday has raised some questions from the un-informed... So as a public service - in the hopes that all might know the joy and wonder of scoring an elusive Bag o' Crap, I will do my best to explain what it actually is...

First off, you need to know what Woot is. I've mentioned Woot a few times before, and always said that someday I'd do a proper introduction. Looks like today's the day!

First off, Woot can be found at (shock!) woot.com. Each day they have ONE item for sale, usually at a ridiculously low price, and always with $5.00 shipping. Doesn't matter if it's an mp3 player or a mobility scooter, the shipping is $5.00. If you were to go there today, here's what you'd see:


And if anyone has gutters that need cleaning and hates actually DOING the cleaning, you'd be smart to pick up this iRobot Looj Gutter Cleaning Robot. iRobot makes a vacuuming robot called Roomba, and Cindy has two of them. They're great! They roam the house in search of dirty floors and tirelessly suck up all the filth until the floors are clean and/or their batteries are dying, at which time they re-dock themselves to charge up for next time. The Looj is kind of the same thing, except you put it in your gutter rather than on your floor. And getting it for $74.99 after shipping is quite a deal!

So if you wanted one, you'd (again - shock!) click the "I want one!" button. If you DON'T want one however, there's nothing you can do about it, other than wait until Midnight Texas Time (10:00 PM here in the civilized world) and see what the next day's item is. And if they should sell out of their stock of Looj before midnight, then the "I want one!" button turns into a "Sold Out!" sign and again, you're waiting until midnight to see what comes next. That's how it works, day in and day out.

Except, for the total pandemonium that is the Woot-Off. Occasionally, maybe like every other month or so, they throw this model out the window, and get rid of the leftovers that didn't sell, smaller quantities of products that couldn't justify a full day on the site, and they generally top it off with either custom Woot screaming, flying monkeys with capes and helmets or a Bag o' Crap.

By their own admission, the Bag o' Crap is Crap. The people who write the product descriptions at Woot have WAY too much fun describing gadgets (just go to the site and read whatever's there right now - you'll see what I mean), but they really hit their peak with the Bag o' Crap, officially known as "Random Crap". One recent offering, which I failed to get in on, said something like "Don't even click that 'I Want One!' button. You'd be better off going down to the local dollar store, putting a blindfold on, spinning around and then buying the first three things you touch." And often, it is dollar store quality crap, sometimes it's a step down from dollar store quality crap.

But just to make things interesting, once in a while, Woot throws in nice things like a Tivo, a Digital Camera, or even a large flat panel TV. This leads to a communal "unboxing" of the Crap in the Woot forum pages, with those living near Woot's Texas headquarters getting theirs first, and posting pictures and descriptions for all to see. Because the crap is so random, it really is kind of like playing the lottery. Except that you always get SOMETHING, as opposed to a worthless piece of paper and silver gunk under your fingernails.

With all of this in mind, during a Woot-Off, every new item that comes on is eagerly anticipated, and the forums are full of people encouraging everyone to buy lots of them, so we can get to the Crap. When it finally shows up, it's like a nuclear bomb went off on the Internet. As I mentioned last Friday, they sold 4,500 items in less than 2 minutes. Really, it was probably less than a minute. This was my second victory, and every other time, I never even saw the option to buy. Trying to load the page gets a "Server Too Busy" error... And so you try again, and again, and suddenly it's "Sold Out". And you're like "Wha-wha-whaaaa??" The aftermath is usually something that they have lots and lots of, and isn't very exciting, and it feels like the calm after a hurricane.

There are a couple other cool Woot features. They started a t-shirt site last year, at shirt.woot.com - with a new t-shirt every day, for $10 including shipping. And a few months ago they partnered with Yahoo for "Woot Sellout". If you go to shopping.yahoo.com and look down to the middle of the page, you'll see the "Deal of the Day, Powered by Woot!" So there are three Woot sites to check every night at bedtime... It's kind of a fun ritual that Cindy and I enjoy... And we've made quite a few purchases from the Woot empire. Just look!

Yep, everything from Roombas to Leakfrogs to Zunes and many different T-Shirts... We Love Woot!