Welcome to ...

The place where the world comes together in honesty and mirth.
Windmills Tilted, Scared Cows Butchered, Lies Skewered on the Lance of Reality ... or something to that effect.


Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Hideous $10,000 plastic Xmas tree


Grad writes, "While cruising Amazon looking for some new Xmas tree magic for my family, I ran across what must be the world's most expensive Xmas tree."
It's a Xmas-friendly price of only $9,993.50. I like the way they kept it just a hair below $10K -- and I love the specificity of the price point.
Yes, it's a pretty special tree, that's for sure -- first of all it's 'pre-lit' -- so the lights are included -- and it's pink (which is super fun) and it's a massive 4 feet tall. What's really driving the price IMO is the massive 110 branch tips and staggering 70 UL-listed pink bulbs. People -- they're *UL-listed* -- this tree isn't f'ing around!
And the value continues -- the tree stand is INCLUDED. Yep, let me repeat that -- the tree stand IS INCLUDED. The topper is simply stunning -- the tinsel needles are flame retardant. Sure, maybe you wanted to light this baby up, but sorry -- no flames for you!
I bought two.
Kidding aside, I'm guessing that this is one of those auto-pricing algorithm bugs that crop up from time to time on Amazon; different vendors use bots to set their prices relative to one another and the bots get into a race condition and set the prices to astronomical levels.
The other outcome is race-conditions that drive prices down, as happened on Amazon UK on Black Friday, when someone figured out how to induce the race-condition and drove the prices of many goods down to 1p.

No comments: