Black Thursday Followup

As you may already know, Amazon's incredible Customers Vote sale for $100 XBox Core systems, sold out in 29 seconds. While apparently my brother Mark was never able to view the "Get this deal" screen, it looked liked I was lucky enough to. Using Firefox, I hit the refresh button at 10:58. It took a couple of minutes to refresh, but at exactly 11:00 I saw the screen which allowed me to purchase one so after a quick pause, I clicked on the link. Worried that I would lose my place "in line", I patiently waited while the next page loaded. Then I waited. And waited. And waited. After about 30 minutes of checking up on the site while I was cooking some food for Thanksgiving, I gave up but still left the page open.

After returning later that night I clicked another link on the page, hit the back button and decided to click on the get this deal button to see what would happen. Sure enough it worked and progressed to the verification page! Did it save me a reservation after all this time? I typed in the correct answer to find out. Bam! "We're very sorry!" was the answer.

The next day I contacted Amazon and explained to them what happened in the hopes they would still extend the offer to me or at least give me some type of gesture of goodwill discount. They were very apologetic but stood firm on the basis that several customers received the verification page but did not answer in time before the entire allocation sold out. I guess in hind site I should have realized that after a few seconds of loading, to hit the stop button and click on the button again. But who knew? 29 seconds isn't a lot of time to figure out Amazon's server issues. Oh well, it was a good opportunity anyways.