Amazon’s 20th Anniversary Prime Day Sale Starts Off With a Slow Fizzle
For weeks Amazon has been pushing out content via social media and on its own website boasting about Prime Day, the internet super sale to end all super sales. So, when it finally kicked off today, users were most likely not expecting what they ended up receiving, a digital garage sale rife with things that no one, including Amazon, want. To say that Prime Day was a bust would be a massive understatement. After promising to have “more deals than Black Friday,” you would think that the shopping giant would have offered its Prime customers, who pay $99 per year for the title, at least a handful of things they were hoping to catch a deal on. Instead, what users received early on in the day was the digital equivalent of walking into a Radio Shack going-out-of-business sale on the last day only to find all the odds and ends you didn’t know you didn’t want. To make matters worse, many of the purported “sales” were minuscule in terms of the deal you were getting. Call me a pessimist, but $2 off a 48 pack of Quilted Northern toilet paper hardly registers as a bargain to me.
The best part about it all? I’m not alone in my tickled negativity. In typical fashion, the internet reacted hilariously to the perceived fail, taking to Twitter to post screenshots of some of the more hilarious “deals” and make jokes at Amazon’s expense, using the hashtag #PrimeDayFail. Below are just a few of my favorites that I found after just a minute of scrolling.
@NASA successfully sends a space craft 3+ billion miles away, and @amazon couldn’t even execute a garage sale… #PrimeDayFail #strangeworld
— Stoury (@_Stoury_) July 15, 2015
Box sets of TV Shows that everyone already streams on @netflix #PrimeDayFail — Tommy Campbell (@MrTommyCampbell) July 15, 2015
These Starry Night Clogs would have made Vincent VG cut out his eyes and mail them to Jeff Bezos | http://t.co/E89LWvmbMC #PrimeDayFail
— Russ Reeves (@russreeves) July 15, 2015
Load up on your NUT MILK BAGS, people! It’s #PrimeDay! Best deals on nut milk bags of the year! #PrimeDayFail pic.twitter.com/2f3LERbAlg — t.j. peters (@tpeters) July 15, 2015
I’m sure that in the end the numbers will work out in Amazon’s favor as the deals get better later in the day, but there is no denying that today Amazon’s brand and their ego took a bit of a hit. The only thing for them to do now is to take one on the chin and chug along.