Little Beans

A few random little beans to share with you.

1. It's Friday!

2. I had $13 in my tip jar this morning by 9am. I'd only been open for two hours. That's crazy!

3. Ivy is at summer camp. Sort of. She's with my mom at the farm until Monday, and she's been there since Wednesday morning. I miss her a lot! But I do NOT miss walking her in this heat. How nice it is to wake up in the morning and not have to walk her first thing - or first thing when I get home from work. But seriously, I miss her! I hear she's having a good time running all over the place, swimming in the pool, farting up a storm. Seriously. From an email my mom sent me:

"By the way, your precious darling just cut the loudest fart I've ever heard out of a dog! She looked behind her to see what the noise was!"

4. I've now seen Inception twice. It was an interesting experience. I still loved the movie, but Corbin came out with a lot more questions than he did the first time. Trying to answer them troubled me, even though it all still made sense for me. I think we've gotten most of them worked out, but just to be sure, we're going to see it again on Saturday night in an IMAX theater. Nothing like amazing sound and a giant picture to answer your questions.

5. BidFire.com is my new best friend. It's an auction website where they auction off crazy things like iPads and $500 Visa gift cards and KitchenAid mixers and other cool things for barely any money. Sounds like there's a catch, right? Well, there can be if you're not smart about it. In order to bid on anything you have to purchase bids at $1 per bid - which can seriously add up if you're not smart about your bidding. Sure, you may have gotten that $50 Target gift card for $1.56 (which I did!) but you also paid $20 for each of the bids you spent trying to get it (which I did not). Each bid sends the price up in either $.01 increments or $.05 increments, but here's the thing: there's no swooping in at the last second to snag the item because every bid in the last 30 seconds resets the clock to :30. So you won't win until other people give up or run out of bids or don't hit the button when they mean to.

It can be a long process, depending on the item - the auction for a 16GB iPad yesterday went for 3 hours after closing time and sold for $23.93. Set at $.01 increments, that was a LONG auction, and who knows how many bids the winner spent trying to get it, but added together, it was probably still far less than $500, which is the retail price of the iPad.

So how do they make money, you ask? How can they possibly sell items for so little? It is ridiculously simple and one of the smartest ideas I've ever heard of. I've even already told you: they charge you $1 per bid. Do you realize that 2,393 bids were placed to get that iPad up to $23.93? BidFire made nearly five times the retail price of the iPad. They made $2,393 on a $500 iPad! Ridiculous! They also auction off their own bids. An auction for 250 bids, which would normally cost a user $250, got up to about $54 before it ended, in bidding increments of $.05. Awesome deal for the buyer, and BidFire made over $1000 on something that doesn't even cost them money - that's four times how much they would make if somebody just bought 250 bids.

Here's the other thing: you're not a complete loser if you don't win the auction. Based on your bidding pattern (how often & when you bid on an item) they will award you Fireballs at the end of a lost auction. This is basically virtual currency that you can use to purchase almost any of the items that they auction in their Fireball Store. 

Anyway, I'm kind of obsessed with this website now. I've won two $50 Target gift cards and paid a total (including bids & shipping) of $25.60. So basically I'm getting about $75 free money at Target. Yesterday they were auctioning off a KitchenAid mixer that I desperately wanted, and the only thing that kept me from getting it for $.35 was the internet at the hospital where I work. It didn't get my bed in, so instead of resetting the clock, the auction ended. Bah. But I took a look at Target's website and found the mixer in a thousand different amazing colors, which was silver on BidFire (boring). My new plan is to win a bunch of gift cards - Target, Visa, whatever - and buy it in the color I want. OR! Win something awesome that I don't need and sell it. Do you know how much money I could make if I'd won the MacBook Pro they auctioned off last night? I was so close.

If you think you might want to try it out... let me know first, I'll have them send you an email, and then I'll get 5 free bids for referring you. That would be super awesome! 

I'm off to finish up my shift and head home - I've gotta say, leaving at noon on a Friday is not a bad deal.