Tuesday, July 01

Woot Turns 10 in July: Happy Birthmonth to Us!

by Jason Toon 4 months ago

Has it really been 260 fortnights? Has Woot existed for one-hundredth of a millennium already? Where did those two Roman lustra go? Yes, this month Woot celebrates 70 dog years of questionable business decisions and occasionally reliable customer service - and we're passing the jubilation on to you with our Woot 10 celebration! Please enjoy:

Our live birthday Wootcast, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. PST, Friday, July 11: A full day of jinks both hi- and lo-, streamed live from the Woot studios! The centerpiece will be a participatory ecommerce experience utterly unlike anything ever yet attempted anywhere by anybody. We'll reveal more later. Seriously, this is gonna be insane.

$10 daily shirts at Shirt.Woot: All month long, our shirt store is turning back the price clock with $10 featured shirts every day! Let's party like it's 2004 except we didn't have a T-shirt store in 2004 so more like 2007 but that's confusing with the whole 10-year-anniversary thing so let's just say 2004! Awooh!

Woot Vault product descriptions: With all this partying going on, who's got time to write new product descriptions for every single Today's Woot deal? Not us! So we're flipping through our stash of thousands of product writeups and featuring the choicest deep cuts in the main writeup space on each Woot site.

Games, videos, giveaways, animal fights, and more: We're working on all kinds of fun to celebrate ten years of Woot in the most fitting of ways: with a scattershot, slapped-together jumble of ill-conceived folly. Catch it!

Most of all, Woot 10 is a gift to thank you, the fans, for keeping us alive as we near puberty. You don't even have to buy anything. But you know, come on, we've gone to a lot of trouble here. Would it kill you to flip us a couple of bucks?

Tuesday, October 08

Late Morning: The Woot Talk Show Premieres Today

by Jason Toon a year ago

Everything changes today at 10 AM Pacific. Woot presents the premiere episode of Late Morning, the one-hour morning chat show for heavy sleepers, office slackers, and people so cheap and lazy they'd rather watch an amateur video stream than pony up for cable - in other words, our kind of people. Watch it on the Woot front page or on our Ustream channel. But why should you?

Debonaire, seductive host Jason Toon chats with Woot uberhoncho Garth Mader about retail and life, including questions from Woot fans (submit your own in the live chat). Master homemaker Sean Adams demonstrates some kicky craft projects to liven up your home, your van, or the storage space where you illicitly reside in direct violation of your rental agreement. La muy fabulosa Amy Nance dishes on the fiercest fall fashions. And don't miss the product demos, a very special canine guest, and other crappy surprises.

For you greedy viewers, we'll be giving away every product we feature on Late Morning over on the Woot Facebook page. Just give us a "Like", then keep an eye out for the giveaway posts after the broadcast.

That's Late Morning, the only morning talk show produced and presented by unattractive office workers with no broadcast experience. If you have a family emergency or something and you do miss today's episode, we'll do another one on Tuesday, November 12. And nobody can stop us. It's in the Constitution. We checked. See you on Ustream and have a fantastic Late Morning!

Friday, August 30

Watch This First: First Day of School, 1985

by Jason Toon a year ago

My kids start school next week, and it's not hard for me to remember that ambivalent first-day-of-school mixture of excitement and dread - especially when I watch this 1985 news report about the first day of school in Minot, North Dakota.

Watch Watch This First first, every weekday morning. Because the best way to start the day is to start it a few minutes later.

Tuesday, August 27

Watch This First: The World's Tallest Slum

by Jason Toon a year ago

Sometimes, Seattle, the city where I live, feels like a difficult place to find an affordable home in. But I'm ashamed to even think that when I consider a place like Caracas, Venezuela. The housing shortage there is so acute that in 2007, squatters took over a unfinished skyscraper that had been abandoned for thirteen years. Since then, the 2,500 residents of Torre de David have done what they can to turn this construction site into a home. A communal electrical grid, an aqueduct water system, shops, and other basic services all function illegally in this vertical slum. This short documentary by Vocative is a rare look inside this spontaneous frontier outpost in the middle of a vast city.

Watch Watch This First first, every weekday morning. Because the best way to start the day is to start it a few minutes later.

Friday, July 12

Bag of Cake: Get a Piece of Woot's Birthday Action

by Jason Toon a year ago

Happy Woot's 9th birthday, y'all! If we could, we'd stop by your desk, cockpit, dugout, lifeguard chair, or clown car and have a piece of cake with you. But any idiot knows that's impossible, so instead, we're inviting you to eat video cake with us in a live stream we're calling Bag of Cake! Here it is right here!

Streaming live video by Ustream

If it's between 9 AM and 5 PM Pacific time, you should be looking at a bonafide Woot staffer eating authentic cake in our lifelike video studio. And if you're extremely lucky, that Woot staffer will show or tell you how to get your hands on our gift to counterintuitive marketing: a Bag of Crap!

Maybe he or she will hold up a sign with a URL on it. Or read a URL aloud. Or give you some other instructions for landing everyone's favorite worthless pile of junk. The point is, these BOC shout-outs could happen at any time throughout the day. Look away at your peril!

The party keeps on going at Shirt.Woot, where we're offering cake-themed shirts at 20% off - including the return of the long-beloved, long-unavailable The Cake is a Liar! Not only do these shirts look great, but they're great for wiping cake off of your mouth with. But don't miss the festivities: this sale ends at 5 PM Pacific.

And whatever happens, we hope you enjoy the Bag of Cake. Staring at strangers eating for hours, just for a chance to buy some worthless castoffs: if there's a better way to sum up these past 9 years of Woot, consider yourselves lucky we didn't think of it!

Friday, June 28

Order Cancellation: You Can Do It Now, If You Must

by Jason Toon a year ago

Hey, we've been there. You get carried away with the clicking and the shopping and the next thing you know you're sitting there wondering why on Earth you just bought that thing. That's why we're now offering you the ability to easily cancel your Woot order before it ever even starts moving through our system.

There are limits: you've only got 15 minutes to do it, and it doesn't apply to orders with expedited shipping or orders of Woot-Off sales. But otherwise, here's how it works. First, look for the little "Cancel" link on your order confirmation page, like so:

Then you'll see the following page, asking if you're really, seriously, super for-real sure you want to cancel:

Monday, April 01

Undeca-Fun! Woot Launches 11 New Sites In One Day!

by Jason Toon 2 years ago

Like young America making the Louisiana Purchase, or the core My Little Ponies officially admitting the Cutie Mark Crusaders into their sisterhood, today Woot more than doubles its territory in one bold stroke! We're launching no less than 11 new sites today, each focused like a laser on a particular niche of today's ecommerce retail online shopping marketplace of today.

Of course, this daring thrust raises questions. What's the big idea? Is this a historic day or an historic day? And most important, can we really offer a wide enough variety of deals to justify so many new categories? Check out today's deals on all the new sites for the emphatic answer to that question…

Thursday, February 28

Suddenly Lost Your CEO Job? Woot's Hiring

by Jason Toon 2 years ago

So your company was hemorrhaging money and the Board of Directors decided you weren't the man for the job anymore. Tough break. But look at it as an opportunity: an opportunity to work for Woot!

Right now, the Woot jobs page lists openings for everything from Senior Vendor Managers to Software Developers, from Director of Inventory Planning to Member Services Representative. You'll want to build your typing chops back up before you apply for that last one. You probably haven't done much typing lately, and 70 WPM is not negotiable.

We're sure you'll land on your feet, and maybe those feet will be under a desk here at Woot. One word of advice, though: during the interview, you might not want to make the claim that you "helped invent daily deals." We won't fall for that one.

Friday, December 21

Apocalyptic Giveaways All Day on Woot's Facebook Page!

by Jason Toon 2 years ago

So here we are. The end of the world. Guys, it's been swell. But before we all ride the cosmic handbasket into oblivion, there's still time for one more naked promotional ploy.

Mortimer, the more impulsive of our two spokesmonkeys, is tidying up his cubicle for the impending Armageddon. And he's dumping the contents all over Woot's Facebook page. Go there, LIKE us, and watch for giveaway announcements throughout the day to win a piece of "problem inventory" to call your very own!

Of course, no amount of unwanted consumer junk can stave off the inevitable devouring of everything you hold dear. Goodbye, cruel wooters. We'll catch you fools on the flippity-flop.

Friday, December 14

The Lamestreaming Media Live Wootcast: Coming Monday!

by Jason Toon 2 years ago

Just what the Internet needed: more of our ugly mugs. This Monday, December 17, at noon and 4 PM central, you can watch, chat with, and cruelly mock Woot as we stumble through our first-ever live Wootcast!

We're calling it The Lamestreaming Media Live Wootcast and it'll be rife with dumb jokes, pointless product demonstrations, and candid talk from the sensational Woot "personalities" you've never heard of! Submit your questions and comments now! And we'll see you Monday!