What was it, like three weeks? Three weeks of advertising, building up, rumors, claims and allegations that Amazon Prime Day was going to be bigger than Black Friday? Picked up by mainstream media, blogs, and other trendy snark sites alike, it certainly did its job of making us consumers think that Wednesday, July 15th was going to be a notable day to mark on the calendar, and prepare our wallets for some good old fashioned American consumerism.
Which would’ve been great and all, if you were in the market for like, a brand new multi-USB AC adapter, or Apple-complaint Lightning cables. Or were easily seduced by thinking 30% off is not actually an arbitrary number that cuts a portion of the pre-set inflation in order to create profit.
Seriously, I was like many people who thought Amazon would be worth going to on 07.15.15, and wondered if I could get something really awesome, like some really great kitchen knives, a Bluetooth keyboard-case for my iPad mini, or some new gadget to play with.
Instead, it was an entire work day of refreshing, only to find a whole lot of things that nobody really wanted, and the things that did wanted had a quantity of like two, to which the status bar of how complete the lightning sales were, filled up in literally two seconds. And I say literally, because there was one product I had entertained, that upon first refresh at 4:50:00, and the page coming back at 4:50:02, it was already at 100% fulfilled.
It’s not really sour grapes because nothing I really wanted was on sale, but it’s really the fact that Amazon really didn’t have anything at all that was truly worth calling home about, and telling others to jump aboard the bargain train. The general consensus of social media I saw when I got home from work seemed to hit the nail on the head when they accused Prime Day of more or less being Amazon’s online yard sale, of all the excess things and less desirable goods, and so very few things were actually genuine bargains.
Either way, I caved in on one thing, because I guess I felt like if I were going to vest interest into Prime Day, I shouldn’t walk away from it empty handed. That being said, I saw a mouse that caught my fancy, because my wireless mouse seems to be losing effectiveness, and a wired mouse seemed like the best thing to have additionally plugged in, especially for when I want to play LoL. It was already cheap enough to take a flyer on, but it was scheduled to go on lightning sale at 2:50. And at first refresh at 2:50:00, it turned out to be a gargantuan $4 less than the previous cost, and showed 42% fulfillment by 2:50:02, and thankfully, I was able to make the requisite three mouse clicks to send the order to checkout, and I walk away from Prime Day with enough extra dollars to get a Chic-Fil-A sandwich, but no waffle fries and drink, on top of a brand new mouse.
I’m not mad, but Prime Day was certainly a colossal disappointment.
But hey, in a way, Amazon did kind of dupe the rest of the retailing world into making some reactionary sales, to compete. From what I understand, retailers all across the commercial world had sales to compete with the wealth of savings that Amazon was boasting about having. But when Amazon deliberately fielded their B-team while everyone played their starters, watched their stocks dwindle at reduced costs, this kind of puts Amazon in somewhat of an advantageous position. Whether this was deliberate or not, who really knows, but either way, it’s a Clever Girl kind of tactic.
