Too Good To Be True

You know how people say, "If it looks too good to be true then it probably is?" Well unfortunately I fell victim to this common saying over the past weekend. My roommate Nick and I were just lounging around on the futon watching some Sunday T.V. when we stumbled upon an interesting commercial. The ad was for a new website called Beezid.com. According to the ever so truthful television this revolutionary website is the host of an online penny auction in which customers can find products for up to a whopping 99% off. I instantly thought to myself, “No way!” out of sheer naïve-ness. Just to get a little mental picture of what I witnessed so you can relate to this story, they advertised a new Dodge Charger that was sold for $900. Nintendo Wii’s selling for only a couple dollars. My first thoughts were that it couldn’t possibly be a scam because it was being advertised on T.V. Yet, I couldn’t quite get myself to buy all the way into the idea after I had sat and analyzed what I had just witnessed because, as the saying goes, it looked way too good to be true. It was literally hard to fathom buying these normally high priced items for practically no money. Who would they sell these wonderful gifts at such absurdly low prices? There must be some sort of catch! This is what kept spinning around in my head, and wouldn’t you know it, I was right doggone it!

I logged on to the seemingly life saving website and found that items are placed on the page with a time limit, then members of the website can bid on each item. Every time a new auction starts the bid starts at $0.00 and goes up a penny each time a new person bids on it. When an auction gets down to less than 20 or 30 seconds (depending on the item) the clock gets reset to 20 or 30 after a new bid is placed. This way no one can wait until the last second and then just swoop in with a final bid. Now at this point it’s not looking so bad right? Welllll that’s exactly what I was thinking until the site’s information page abruptly slapped me back to reality. I was looking into the details of getting involved and to my displeasure I stumbled across “the catch” as I like to call it. The only thing standing between me and the best fricken website ever made. A fee. That is correct, a darn fee. It turns out that those bids I was talking about earlier are not free. Once you become a member of the site you are given the option of purchasing bids. The lowest number of bids you can buy is 30 and that runs for $27. Or if you’re a big shot you can buy 500 bids for $300. So I found the catch. At this point I started to try and rationalize the situation and tell myself that, “oh well I’m sure you’ll make that money back easily with all of the great deals.” But it didn’t take me long to once again lower my expectations for this website. If you think about it, they're are most likely thousands or even possibly millions of people that use this website. Now, think about how many people could be bidding on one item at a time. You could easily go through 30 bids, a.k.a. $30, in a matter of seconds with absolutely no guarantee of winning anything. This is how they get people hooked and how they make their money. It’s really ingenious if you think about it. The site makes tons of money and people are getting great deals on expensive items, while a much larger population tells themselves that their so close to winning one of the auctions and that its worth buying all the bids. It’s practically an online casino. Anyways, moral of the story: always check something out if it looks too good to be true, because as disappointing as it may be to find out, it most likely is.