This is a fun little gripe, not a particularly deep reflection on anything.

I recently dug back into my email to find the following gem:

As you can see, I’m coming up on 15 years (at least) as a customer of Woot!, the daily deal and “bag o’ crap” seller of geek fame. I’ve been a customer long enough to remember moofi, and I’m pretty sure I remember them having just one deal a day.

Well, Amazon acquired Woot! in 2010, and it’s kinda folded in nicely since then. You can log in and pay with Amazon, and Amazon Prime shoppers get Prime shipping and occasional benefits (like a $5 discount on the already marked down Woot! version of this 100-pack of Peets Nespresso-compatible capsules, which are $62 on Amazon but $39 on a recent day’s Woot! deals).

But somehow the marketing email side of Amazon doesn’t realize they have customers who are already customers of Woot!, because 40 times since 2014 (most of them in the last year), they’ve sent me an invitation to join Woot!.

Now before the Amazon login integration, I could understand it. After all, my Woot and Amazon accounts are under different email addresses, in part because when I started shopping with Amazon in 1999, Gmail didn’t exist.

Darn, I don’t need that Solaris 2.6 guide anymore, and the return window has closed.

Anyway, it’s things like this, and getting ads in my mobile games for other games I already have (even the game I found that mobile game through), that make me feel that AI isn’t quite all it’s feared to be just yet.

And I’m a bit disappointed that they haven’t offered me a new customer promo code in each of those 40 emails. That would be a LOT of deeply discounted coffee capsules and cast iron grill accessories, and maybe, just maybe, my first-ever Bag O Crap.

Where do we go from here?

Well, a new Woot email just came in, so I’m going to go look at what I don’t need from this week’s deals.