See, I have a motherboard I belong to of other Sanctimommies and Lazymommies (and Everymommy in between). Many years ago, someone introduced us to Woot and got us all hooked.
Their business model is simple: sell one item a day. When it is gone, go home. You may order 1, 2, or 3 of that item and pay the same flat rate shipping of $5. A ball point pen or a washer and dryer set have the same shipping, as do three ball point pens or three washer dryer sets. In the last 4 years, I've bought 1,2, or 3 of 76 items. Some of them are vitally useful like bacon salt or flying screaming monkeys, some completely ridiculous like robot vacuum cleaners or Mp3 players.
Over the years they have expanded to include kids.woot, shirt.woot, sellout.woot and wine.woot. The shirts are geekishly fabulous and all the other stuff, like all wootables, is refurbs, overstock and things you didn't know you needed til you saw it there. (Like the universal remote with ten buttons to pre-program your favorite channels into with little labels to stick next to those buttons. Perfect for those of us with 100 channels, four of which we actually watch.)
When they get a miscellaneous pileup of junk, they have a woot-off. It is recognizable by its flashing yellow lights and volume bar. Once all of that item has sold, the next appears. These go for up to three days. During that time, we'd start a thread on our mommy message board and hang out on the thread, hitting F5 in anticipation of the next item.
A group of about of us bonded over these threads and splintered off. Fourteen of us still remain and meet up once a year. Through these women, I have gotten to go to places like California and Chicago, gotten really good parenting advice and, occasionally, been talked off the ledge.
I've developed deep and lasting friendships, but what I'm really after is crap. Random Bag of Crap, at $8.33 including tax and shipping, could be anything from a Roomba or a Wii to a bag of Genuine Texas Air.
Seven times have I gotten Crap and seven times has it pretty much been crap.
Well, while meeting up in the D-FW Metroplex this weekend, we went on a tour of the holy land.
Where This Woot Guy gave us a 45-minute tour.
He looked EXACTLY like I'd pictured A Woot Guy to look, except he wasn't wearing birkenstocks, citing 'hobbit feet' as his reason not to ever wear sandals anywhere. The printing press and shipping areas fascinated me, as well as the Woot Off room--where they pretty much camp out until they're out of stuff.
Eight of us were on the tour and he was not quite sure how to handle eight suburban mommy superfans of a site that essentially sells video cards to seventeen year olds buying them with mom's lifted credit card.
But he did give us free monkeys and misprint shirts. My monkey clung to the sign as it said goodbye.
We weren't allowed to take pictures inside, as he (rightfully) assumed they were going straight to the internet. I did sneak one picture in their bathroom where crap is apparently just as elusive as it is on their website.
See? The Genuine Woot HQ Toilet contains no crap.
At the end of the tour, we got monkey autographs from a famous Lemon
before eating In-and-Out.
While I'd half expected two guys in a garage who had trained kittens to apply duct tape to the server, it was everything I'd dreamed of.
1 comment:
It was so fun, not just the tour but the whole weekend! :)
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