In years gone by, my husband has been the biggest football fan.  It didn’t matter what team was playing, if there was a game on he was going to watch it.  He doesn’t support one team in particular, just football in general.  He would try to get me to bet little bets on the game, nothing monetary but house chores, about who was going to win.  Oddly, this year he hasn’t watched a single game and yesterday I found out why.

 It seems that there’s this website out there called beezid.com.  It’s an online penny auction that is much different from EBay.  Maybe this site has been around for a while, I don’t know, but I saw it for the first time yesterday.  I was puttering around the house and my husband was just sitting on the couch with the laptop oohing and aahing over what was on the screen.  He’s done this before with classic cars so I figured that’s what he was looking at.  But if he’s looking at cars he’ll only spend an hour perusing the Internet before he either gets bored with it or depressed at the prices of the cars.  After his usual hour was over, I had to see what he was looking at.  This auction site is shown in real time where you can see people bidding on various items from PS3s to Victoria’s Secret gift cards.  You can buy these items for well below the normal price.  When I looked at it, the PS3 was going for about five bucks with only twenty-three minutes left in the auction.  But that’s where the kicker is.  Every time someone bids on something the time resets by a specified time depending on what the item is.  The times that I saw for the items to be reset by varied from twenty seconds (for a beezid.com bidding package) to a minute and a half for bigger ticket items.  Another thing that bothered me about that site was that it costs money for each time you place a penny bid.  Even though the product price is only going up by a penny, you’re actually spending a buck for each bid.

 Last night, the laptop came to bed with my husband.  He was watching the bids for different things trying to learn how the site actually worked thinking we could do some major Christmas shopping there.  I’m still skeptical.  I found myself watching this site with him and rooting for certain usernames to win different products.  There was a Chevron gas card worth $150 going for five bucks.  Two different people were going head to head trying to win this thing.  I started pulling for the more feminine sounding username.  When my husband saw this, he put a wager of cleaning under the refrigerator on it and started pulling for the more masculine sounding name.  Guess what I’m doing later today.

 I really don’t know if I ever want to shop on this site though because it seems like this beezid.com is the claw machine of the Internet.  You know how claw machines are set up in places to draw kids in and have them spend their parents’ hard earned money to try to win an ugly Sponge Bob stuffed animal.  I think those things are just there to get kids to learn how to gamble when they get older.  Claw machines are like kiddie slots machines.  I think this is how beezid.com is.  It pulls people in and gets them to really want an item.  They might get so caught up in the penny bidding process that they forget that with each click they’re spending a dollar, not a penny.  I had to point this fact out to my husband.  This isn’t something that I found broadcast openly on the site.  I’m sure it’s somewhere in the terms of agreement if you register for the site, but it’s not right there saying “Okay, bamboo42 just bid a penny but really she just spent her life savings trying to buy a forty-seven dollar Blackberry.”

 I have to end this now.  My husband is clamoring for the laptop.  It seems that there’s a reverse auction he wants to watch today.  The reverse auctions have a bigger price but every time someone clicks to see what the going price of the item is, it lowers the price by a certain amount.  He’s looking at his phone right now telling me what the auctions we watched last night ended at.  I keep having to remind him that you’re not just bidding a penny but a dollar along with it.  Oh, if only I were an auction.  Then he would listen.