Woot: One Day, One Deal

The internet is a wonderful place. As I was reviewing all of my friends’ status updates a few days ago, one of my friends had posted “…just successfully completed an order for 3 Bags O' Crap from Woot.com! $1 a "bag", 3 random items per bag. Could be anything from a glitter pen to an X-Box360!” Well of course I had to figure out what this “Bag O’ Crap” was – bags of stuff in general are pretty great. I headed over to Woot.com and read the forum pages, slowly learning what a Bog O’ Crap was and exactly how excited all of the buyers on Woot.com were about them. (By the by: they were all very excited) They were, in fact, exactly what they proposed: bags of random, mostly useless stuff that no one really needs. But there is a slim chance that your "bag" might contain a useful - and in fact, really nice - electronic device or other item.
Woot.com is a retailing site that sells only one product a day. They are a jumping-off site for many new, cutting edge products, especially electronics. They sell that one product until it sells out or midnight rolls around. Midnight brings about the next product, whether the last one sold out or not, and the cycle begins anew. All of the commentary by the site maintainers is really funny and a nice break from the straightforward “Size/Color/Quantity” fields that most sites offer.
My new favorite site is Shirt Woot. It is one of two off-shoot sites of Woot, the other one with wine (and sometimes cheese) deals. It has the same set-up, but there is a second site that gets their left-over shirts until they sell out. Shirt Woot often has “derbies” where loyal site goers design shirts. Seeing the wide range of ideas that designers have is very interesting. Some of them are interesting ways of merging current ideology and historical events. One of the most interesting/“controversial” shirts that I found: Roe V Wade


There are also a plethora of shirts parodying styles of shirts that many people are used to. There are also parodies of artists (musical and painting) and video games. One that nicely combines a couple of these is:


Ahh, sweet Escher Tetris. It is only the combination of two of my favorite things. And all this from keeping up with my friends' statuses.
Woot.com and shirt.woot.com are diffinately worth checking out, especially if you're in a bad mood and need a bit of cheering up... or if you need a shirt.