Free Day For All!
SparkFun Electronics held their Free Day event on January 7th, 2010 at 11am EST. I had a few parts that I wanted to order for my senior design project this semester (more coming on that in another post) and was really excited to be able to get those parts for free during the event!
Or maybe not. I hopped into the #Sparkfun chatroom on irc.freenode.net the morning of Free Day to check out what people were chatting about. To my dismay, hours before the event started, there were already almost 700 people in the chatroom. According to Sparkfun’s limitations on the event, only 1,000 $100 orders would be awarded. The numbers were already daunting. I pulled up the Sparkfun website to find their recently updated web servers were already buckling under the load of people preparing their shopping carts. Uh oh. As time neared 11am, the chatroom hit the 1,400 user mark and my hopes of free electronics started to dwindle.
Minutes before the event, I went to my shopping cart, and prepared to click the Checkout button on the hour. 11am struck, my finger punctually tapped the mouse button, and my order request was on it’s way across the ‘tubes to Sparkfun’s datacenter in Colorado… Minutes later, the page timed out and I sent the request again, and again. As the minutes went by, so did the time outs and blank white pages across my screen. Scanning the chatroom, I saw reports of people successfully reaching the shipping page, ready to submit their Free Day order; still nothing on my screen. After an hour of failed attempts, I finally reached the log-in screen. Gah, I logged in just before the event started to avoid this! After providing my account info, I waited another 10 minutes and reached the shipping page. The taste of success was on my tongue as many before me reported their completed orders shortly after reaching the shipping page. I gleefully submitted my shipping information.
And that was the last I saw of Sparkfun.com. As I watched the Firefox throbber spin away, my heart dropped as people reported the giveaway totals nearing dangerously to the $100,000 limit. Before I could reach the billing page, SparkFun announced on Twitter that Free Day was officially over. And so were lost my dreams of free electronics. Sulked, I returned to the chatroom to read the flurry of exuberant posts from those who had successfully received their Free Day orders.
This story ends happily, however. Once the rush of traffic to Sparkfun’s site died down after the event, I was able to trim my bloated cart of electronic goodies to only that which I needed for my project, and proudly submitted my non-free order.
Thanks for the experience, Sparkfun.
I’m still a bit saddened by this:
If you factor in non-monetary cost, the price for participating in Spark Fun’s “Free Day” was far greater for most. Think of the time spent by most and factor in some degree of frustration. In your case you still ended up making a purchase but now paid the additional costs of these as well. Granted, there may have been some “fun” factor (for some sick and twisted individuals) but personally, subtracting this from cost still leaves me paying more. Maybe if there was some level of competition or a game involved: then perhaps “fun” would compensate for the additional non-monetary costs….
Oh well… glad you enjoyed it :) Don’t get me wrong either- good on them for the attempt… maybe it will be a bit more “fun” for me next year (if they do it again that is)
Dave, I agree it was a waste of time for a lot of people, though I was one of the crazy people who just enjoyed watching everything unfold, free stuff or not. I think they should really consider doing things differently next year though. I know Amazon has used a ticket-based system before (similar to how real Black Friday lines work at stores) that might help prevent their site from coming to a halt. They could also do something like 50 tickets per hour so the load is spread out through the whole day instead of everyone swarming at once. I’m sure there are plenty other options they could try out.
Personally, I think they knew about these options and opted for this instead. The general chaos of the event likely fueled the online buzz they got and overall brought more attention to their site than if they had a more organized and sensible giveaway. I can see the tactic, but it does suck that the customers get screwed this way. I can almost guarantee they’ll do this again next year, but I hope it’ll be done differently.