Purely fascinating
Image via Wikipedia
If you haven’t seen Quibids.com, and you’ve got some time to kill, you should go there, if for no other reason than to observe compulsive behavior magnified to the nth degree.
I joined and immediately got caught up in the vortex. I managed to pull out before burning more than a few bucks but it’s nothing if not alluring and probably more than a little dangerous to anyone with a penchant for gambling.
I wound up paying about $1 for a $15 gift card to The Home Depot but only after burning about $14 worth of bid credits on other stuff that I didn’t win.
Assuming you want to participate, you have to sign up and buy a package of bid credits worth 60 cents a piece. Auctions are timed but each new bid adds 10, 15 or 20 seconds to the clock.
As I write this, I’m watching bidders slowly increase the purchase price of an 55-inch LG 1080p LED backlit LCD television. I found this particular auction in the queue with about 30 minutes remaining on the timer and a couple of one-cent bids showing. So, the winning bid for this $1,500 television was two cents, then the real action started.
With about a minute showing on the timer, bids started flowing. They’ve been popping steady now for a couple of hours with each new bid adding 15 seconds to the clock and one cent to the sales price. The winning bid at the moment is about $14.25 but we’re just getting started.
Pretty soon, each new bid will only add 10 seconds to the clock in order to make the process more frenetic.
According to Wikipedia, there used to be a site called “Swoopo” that sounds very similar, if not identical. You can read about it here.
So, the bid is up to $15.69 and I can see a roster of usernames scrolling down a column entitled “Bidding History.” This shows you who bid the latest one-cent bump and whether they did so by manually clicking or setting a thing called “Bid-O-Matic” to do it automatically.
Someone named MYK77 from Elmwood Park, Ill. has been pretty active. I’ve seen at least 20 bumps from this person at 60 cents a pop, and I suspect the actual number is much higher. I’ll bet MYK77 has at least $20 or $30 bucks sunk into this already.
He won’t get that money back, if he loses the auction, but QuiBids will let him apply that money as a discount on the purchase price of the television.
We’re up to $21.75 now and the bids continue to scroll by. The timer is still resetting in increments of 15 seconds, so the pressure is still building. My guess is that other folks are waiting there with automatic bids set to trigger as the price climbs past $25, on past $30 and probably higher.
What’s fascinating and, frankly, a little disturbing is that it’s plain to see this television won’t sell anytime soon. It will sell and it will sell at a deep discount. In the meantime, though, a lot of these folks are paying for something they won’t get. They’re simply subsidizing someone else.
The rational move, or so it would seem, would be to wait for the price to rise much further before bidding so that you don’t needlessly spend money well before the actual purchase price. But no one knows just what that price might be, so they click away at 60 cents a throw, essentially hoping to get lucky in the same way a gambler would.
Let’s do some simple math. Suppose this TV sells for $50. That’s an amazing price, which represents 5,000 one-cent bids at a cost of 60 cents each. $5,000 times .60 equals $3,000. Let’s call that a $1,500 profit for QuiBids on one TV. When you think about it that way this thing really does resemble a casino.
And who knows? Maybe QuiBids rigs this game with bots to keep the bidding going at critical moments. They better not sell too many TVs for just a few bucks or they won’t last. In fact, they really need to sell every single one for at least $25 in order to make back their money in bids.
If I had to bet, though, I’d say they don’t’ need bots. Human beings are more than adequate for this job.
The winning bid is now $25.01 … $25.02 … $25.03 …
