Kind of like a raffle but without having to get all the lawyers involved to make sure you comply with raffle laws.
Ah yes, finally someone will be talking about Amazon and Prime Day.
The only way this deal was discovered it seems, is by careful watchers on slickdeals as well, so I'm going to lean towards this being a legitimate pricing error and not some attempt and sneakily generating PR.
The intentional PR being generated here will be Amazon going "fine, let's eat the loss and show that we put our customers first" instead of going "nope, cancel delivery and don't ship any more, then start requesting voluntary retrieval on the ones that have delivered!" which many companies would have to do but Amazon will likely lose less by letting customers keep them than they net in minutes (if not tens of seconds depending on how many actually shipped).
[1] Unless you are the type who needs a 55 gallons jug of lube. https://observer.com/2015/07/at-1k-55-gallon-bottle-of-lube-...
I'm surprised Amazon honored such a big price mistake. A few weeks ago, some Western Digital drives were priced incorrectly. About half off. Everyone got cancelations. And yes, I heard about it on front page of slickdeals...
Once the deal was caught by one of our mods, the site went into a frenzy. Unfortunately I was AFK during the deal, but this will go down as one of the best price mistakes of the year if not the best.
Similar things have happened on past Prime Days / Black Fridays, I remember some smartphones (Moto?) being sold for under $3 - some were canceled, but some shipped before Amazon managed to cancel them.
Being less flip: it's a massive corporation, which by default don't really care about consumers happiness directly, just that which is necessary for us to part with our many. I find it hard to have sympathy for said corporation -- especially considering the power that they now wield over modern western society.
And it wouldn't be the first time a corporation is duplicitous, that's for sure. I don't personally think this was done on purpose, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was.
This is actually quite a common tactic I've seen other ecommerce stores do around Black Friday. It's also highly illegal, but I guess the companies don't worry too much about it because they don't think the gov agencies can prove it was anything but a mistake. Some companies repeat this trick every 3 years or so. And yes, they do get a ton of media for it every single time.
My wife is a buyer for B&M retail, pricing issues like this happen a lot. In her space, it’d probably take a week to fix.
And the money essentially goes to their customers rather than an advertising agency.
Provide stuff at a price point no one can compete - do this just good enough to hook people and keep the thought in their heads to buy at your place.
Not totally reasonable when thinking it through but that's just marketing of people who know how the human psyche works.
@amzn marketing: well done.
> I need to coin a term for this concept, I see it on every Hacker News thread once it reaches a certain size. It is the attribution of the topic to some nefarious intention of a dude in marketing. Once you start noticing it you can't unsee.
> Intel fires their CEO? It's a PR stunt.
> Startup abandons Europe due to GDPR? PR STUNT!
> AlphaZero beats professionals at Dota 2? You guessed it, it's just PR for oligarchy parent Alphabet.
> I see this so often now it's becoming humorous. As if some how this being all about PR explains everything. It doesn't explain anything! Although I'm sure Bill over in marketing loves that he has subsumed the historical role of deity in explaining the unknown.