Free Day is January 7th, 2010!
by Nate (From http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/news.php?id=305)
November 23, 2009
You can blame it on Chris Anderson’s book Free. After reading his book, I started kicking around the idea of what we can do that’s ‘free’. Sure, we have free bits (open-source hardware designs, available code, etc.), but we don’t have free physical widgets. Now combine that with our love of creating shear havoc (AVC, C&D letter, Portable Rotary Phone), and you get Free Day.
Nobody gives away a free physical thing. There’s always a catch. So up front: you have to pay shipping. Other than that, it’s open season.
* $100 max per household
* You pay shipping
* Limit of $100,000 in giveaways for the day
* Starts 9AM MST January 7th, 2010
* Ends 11PM MST January 7th, 2010 (or when we hit $100k, whichever comes first)
* Rainchecks for popular items will be allowed
Why are we doing this? It’s not that I want to create hell for the shipping, production, and the IT teams at SparkFun. There’s a multitude of reasons.
First and foremost, we want to give back. We’ve had a stellar year in 2009, and it’s all because of you. So please, have a beer (or a Stepper Motor Driver) on us.
Second: We wish we could sponsor more groups but we don’t have a sound way of selecting appropriate projects. Because we can’t afford to say yes to everyone, we have to say no to everyone. It pains us every time we have to do it. So this is a way for us to evenly enable all the students and great minds of the world to pickup a $100 worth of free gear. Go for it!
Third: Free Day will possibly create a maelstrom of site traffic, the likes of which our servers have not seen. At the beginning of December, 2009, SparkFun will be graduating out of its high-chair and moving into a server cluster. We are excited to have the breathing room, and Free Day will help us evaluate just how much breathing room we’re getting. We’ll do everything in our power to keep the site up but please understand that the site may go down.
Fourth: We turn 7 years old! SparkFun is now over 70 employees and is the ripe old age of 49 (in business and dog years). We’d like to celebrate our birthday with a party.
More nitty gritty details:
* There is no special code to type in. But you get only one order on Free Day, so spend it well!
* Only one $100 credit per household. We ask that you respect this limit and don’t try to abuse this gift.
* There is no minimum or maximum order. You can spend more than $100, the balance of which will be charged to your method of payment.
* Only Credit Card and Paypal orders will be eligible for the $100 credit. We don’t want to have people tying up inventory with POs, wire transfers, checks in the mail, or lost faxes.
* You will see whether or not your order qualifies for a credit in the checkout process.
* Free Day does not apply to our distributors. Sorry!
* Gift Cards cannot be bought on Free Day.
* Any returns from Free Day will be exchanged for the same item.
* Every order isn’t going to ship on Free Day, or for a few days after. We’ve got extra tape guns on hand, but please be patient and give us some time to catch up!
* We are ratcheting up inventory for Free Day, but backorders (a.k.a. rainchecks) are allowed on most items (some items we simply can’t get anymore). We’ll get you your goodies just as soon as we can get them back in stock.
As we usually do things here at SparkFun, these rules are open for revision. We may need to tweak them as our astute users point out how silly we are. If we have to make any changes to the rules, we’ll let you all know here on our homepage. So mark January 7th, 2010 on your calendars – it’s Free Day!
NOW TAKING BETS on when it will end:
Free Day is coming! (It’s not today!) 31 days away (January 7th, 2010) and we’re not sure what kind of a mess we’ve created. It’s going to be a heck of a day. What we do know is that everyone seems to think they know when the deal is going to expire. I think it will be over by 11AM. Others claim, without a doubt that $100,00 will be gone in 5 minutes (you’re so wrong!). Everyone has their guess. So why not start a side bet? A game inside of a game really…
The person who can guess when Free Day will end without going over (Price Is Right rules apply), will win a $200 SparkFun credit. Here’s the rules:
* Guess messages must be sent from an email address that is currently registered with SparkFun. You must have a SparkFun customer account, but you don’t have to have placed an order, so anyone can submit a guess, just create an account.
* Guess emails must have the subject “Free Day Guess: HH:MM:SS” (no quotes necessary), where the string of letters is a time (i.e. 09:13:51)
* Time guesses must be in 24hr format (“Free Day Guess: 03:15:00” is 3:15 AM!) and will be considered in MST
* Time guesses MUST have seconds to be counted (“Free Day Guess: 9:15” alone is not acceptable)
* Send as many guesses as you like – we will only count the last one you send
* Guessing is open now and closes at 11:59PM MST January 6th, 2010 (the day before Free Day)
* Price is Right rules (closest without going over)
* If there are multiple entries for the same winning second, we will randomly draw a name from the pool of winning entries
freeday@sparkfun.com is where you send the email with the subject “Free Day Guess: 11:02:45” for a guess of 11:02AM and 45 seconds.
We’re not checking that email box for any reason so don’t send customer service requests there. There is no cost to participate, and we are not going to do anything with your email addresses so don’t worry about receiving spam from us. We just like a good guessing game whenever possible.