Woot.com has a "woot off" every few weeks, and one of the items that goes on sale at a random time during the day is a "bag of crap". For $8, you're promised they'll send you 3 leftover products from their warehouse. Some people have gotten really expensive products, like large LCD TVs and laptop computers, so everyone's willing to give it a try for $8.
Every few weeks, without fail, before and after Amazon acquired the company, the site goes down as a hundred thousand people refresh the page trying to get the order form to load when that item is for sale. It's very frustrating and there are thousands of posts in their forums every time it happens from people that were there and tried to buy but couldn't get the order form to load before it sold out.
Woot knows exactly what they're doing. They lose money on every bag of crap, the fact that the site goes down adds to the fun. They could rent more servers for the day (or hour) that the BOC is available for sale, but why lose even more money? They're selling out of them in seconds, and they're driving insane amounts of traffic to their site for the entire day as people hit refresh on a leakfrog looking for the BOC. That said, they have taken steps to make it a little more randomized, but only because people figured out how to game the system, and most people getting BOCs were running scripts to do it.
Every few weeks, without fail, before and after Amazon acquired the company, the site goes down as a hundred thousand people refresh the page trying to get the order form to load when that item is for sale. It's very frustrating and there are thousands of posts in their forums every time it happens from people that were there and tried to buy but couldn't get the order form to load before it sold out.
A lottery would be better.