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At 8 a.m. Monday, Flipkart.com gave visitors a feeling of a flea market on a Sunday evening. Every time the homepage was refreshed, some product or the other was ‘sold out’. It lent a sense of urgency, even for people like me who had nothing in particular to shop for. There was no one in sight, but it just felt like you were pushing your way through fellow-buyers to get the shopkeeper’s attention.
Despite the agony of technical glitches and several other issues, many said it reminded the e-commerce generation of the sweaty and crowded Diwali markets we once shopped at with our grandparents.
So this morning when I saw a jacket ad in the newspapers about Myntra’s ‘Cracker of a Sale’ offering a flat 50% discount, I could not resist but log in right at 8 a.m., when the sale was to begin, with hopes of a similar mela.
Well, I guess I was the only one to do so.
Unlike the bright orange ‘Big Billion Day’ backdrop of Flipkart’s website, which screamed ‘celebration’ and ‘festivity’, Myntra’s ‘cracker’ appears to be a no-noise version.
May be it was buyers' fatigu from yesterday, so no one’s woken up early, I thought. So I stayed, and refreshed the website over and over. But well, nothing felt exciting or ticking, except for a timer on the sale page (that has about 14,800 products), which says that the offer will end in 14 hours 10 minutes and 27 seconds now.
On Monday, it was hard to miss the buzz of #BigBillionDay and #CheckSnapdealToday, which were both trending for over 12 hours on micro-blogging website Twitter. So I decided to check out what people are saying about Myntra’s offer there.
To my surprise, even the trollers are not making jokes about the Myntra sale! (In fact some Myntra staffers appear to be trying to wake each other up with “Good morning team” messages!)
This tweet (one of the only two consumer tweets I could find this morning) by Chitra Narayanan seems to have summed up the general sentiment: “I am beginning to develop an allergy to the word 'sale' #Myntra”
The husband had this observation to offer: "if a girl is saying that, there’s something seriously wrong with the world!”
