--- title: 'Quibids.com Auction Ripoff' url: 'https://blog.recursiveprocess.com/2010/06/04/quibids-com-auction-ripoff' markdown: 'https://blog.recursiveprocess.com/2010/06/04/quibids-com-auction-ripoff.md' date: '2010-06-04' description: 'My dad sent me a link to quibids.com, an online auction site that allows you to buy items by bidding on them. Sounds familiar? The twist is that this site is a type of penny auction site where each bid costs money. A second catch is the auction has no set time limit. It has a count-down timer b…' taxonomy: category: - blog --- # Quibids.com Auction Ripoff ### [Quibids.com Auction Ripoff](https://blog.recursiveprocess.com/2010/06/04/quibids-com-auction-ripoff) June 4, 2010, 12:00 am My dad sent me a link to [quibids.com](http://www.quibids.com/), an online auction site that allows you to buy items by bidding on them. Sounds familiar? The twist is that this site is a type of [penny auction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_auction) site where each bid costs money. A second catch is the auction has no set time limit. It has a count-down timer but it adds on 10 seconds each time someone bids. It’s great to see a live auction because I always imagine the disappointment had by the winning bidder as the time goes 4…3…2…1…………….14….13 (with a new winning bidder). Anyway, this place makes a load of cash on the simplest of items: gift cards. Here is a completed auction for a $50 Outback Gift Card. [![](https://blog.recursiveprocess.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/quibids1.jpg "quibids")](https://blog.recursiveprocess.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/quibids1.jpg) This deceptive webpage puts the savings at $18.10 for a $50 dollar card. [Inconceivable!](http://talentedapps.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/kijinnmaru-inconceivable.jpg) The Consumer math kids broke down the cost to “saltyfish13”. Saltyfish13 made 43 bids and eventually paid $6.10 for the card. A hidden fact regarding the bids, is that while the bids go up by 2 cents at a time, we assume that they must cost 2 cents. However each bid is **60 cents**! So saltyfish paid $25.80 for the bids and $6.10 for the card, $31.90 overall. How does this company make money if they are giving money away on each bid?? Well even the **losers** to the auction pay 60 cents per bid. Since this auction went up by 2 cents at a time, there were 305 bids. The revenue for this bid is $183 plus the $6.10 for a total of **$189.10** on a $50 gift card!! Wow that’s a nice profit! We went on to talk about how there are plenty of auctions where they may lose a bit of money, but how that is certainly outweighed by the massive profits of a couple of random auctions. They picked up on the idea that the person feeling the worst must be zane51, the *second-to-last* person to bid on the card. Who knows how many times this person has bid to try to win this $50 card. The students went online in pairs to find 3 types of auctions, one big profit, one break even, and one loss. I hope to continue these type of lessons to give the students a shot at not being ripped off nearly as much as many. My favorite part of the day was when somebody described it as a game of musical chairs, where everyone pays a fee for each round that they stay in and the final person keeps the prize. I couldn’t have (and didn’t) described it better. [ Next Post](https://blog.recursiveprocess.com/2010/06/04/standards-based-grading) [Previous Post ](https://blog.recursiveprocess.com/2010/06/03/aarons-rent-to-buy) #### SimpleSearch Bootstrap Theme for [Grav](http://getgrav.org) --- ## Navigation - Parent: [A Recursive Process](https://blog.recursiveprocess.com/index.md) - Previous: [Standards Based Grading](https://blog.recursiveprocess.com/2010/06/04/standards-based-grading.md) - Next: [Aarons (Rent to Buy)](https://blog.recursiveprocess.com/2010/06/03/aarons-rent-to-buy.md)