Hi! Welcome to Mental Floss. I’m Erin McCarthy, and did you know a woman
once sold her allegedly haunted cane online for $65,000? That’s one of many interesting
facts about online shopping we’ll be discussing today, in this episode presented by Discover. Let's get started.
We’re kicking this episode off with a list of some weird things that people have bought
on the internet.
In 2006, a 27-year-old Canadian man wanted to see what he could get for a paperclip.
So, he started trading with strangers on the internet. And he made some great deals. He
started with a single red paperclip and eventually he was offered a farmhouse by an entire town
in exchange for his previous trade: a role in a movie. Some of the other traded items
along the way were a camp stove, a generator, a snowglobe, a snowmobile, and a moving van.
It took a total of fourteen trades to end up with the house.
A man in Australia auctioned off way more than a red paperclip in 2008. He got rid of
everything in his life for $305,000 including his car, house, and all of his belongings.
The idea for the dramatic auction was prompted by a bad divorce, but the story has a happy
ending. He went on to check about 100 items off his bucket list, visiting thirty-one countries
and meeting a new wife along the way.
Apparently the aughts were the perfect time for weird internet purchases because in 2004,
an online casino bought a woman’s haunted cane for $65,000. The cane had previously belonged
to her father. And her six-year-old son believed that having it around meant his grandfather’s
ghost would haunt their house. There were 132 bids before it went to the casino, which
purchased many other strange things in internet auctions, including food that looked like
religious figures, a celebrity’s kidney stone, and name changes for a woman and a
monkey.
The original Hollywood sign was auctioned off for $450,400. The sign looked over Los
Angeles from 1923 to 1978. And in 2005, it was sold to a new owner thanks to the magic
of the internet. The letters were 50-feet-tall and 30-feet-wide.
And finally maybe you’re feeling left out, wishing you could buy some weird item on the
internet, too. So for one that you can purchase online today, we have the message on a potato.
For $9.99 plus $5 shipping, you can get whatever you want written on a potato in black
ink. You can even get pictures drawn on it. That’s way cheaper, and easier to store,
than a bunch of humongous old letters anyway.
Online shopping isn’t just about ease; it’s about getting the best deals. When you save
money, you feel smart. Every day on mentalfloss.com, we round up that day’s best online shopping
bargains. But some days are bigger than others. In the 2018 holiday season, Americans spent
almost $124 billion shopping online, with $6.2 billion on Black Friday and $7.9 billion
on Cyber Monday. In general,
electronics and other tech gadgets are typically a great deal during the Holiday season. But that is just the beginning of
online holiday bargains. If you are shopping with your Discover card, they will match all
all the cash back new card members earn at the end of the first year, automatically.
To inspire your holiday shopping, here are a few less-expected deals you can score during the holidays,
presented by Discover.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are great days to shop for Fluffy and Fido, because pet stores
offer deals on toys, treats, and apparel.
You can score big discounts on both print and electronic books during the Holiday season.
Enrich your brain over the holidays by signing up for some online classes, which are
super discounted on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. You can get an education for as little
as $10 a course.
While you’re shopping this Holiday season, why not treat yourself or your loved ones
to a trip? You can find excellent holiday deals on
everything from airfare to hotels.
Black Friday and Cyber monday are great days to stock up on high-end beauty brands,
which cut their prices by a significant amount both in stores and online.
If you’re interested in online purchases, it’s important to have good financial backing,
ideally through a credit card that works for you. With Discover, they automatically match
the cash back you earn, dollar for dollar, at the end of your first year. Visit Discover.com backslash Match
to learn more.
Let’s rewind the clock a bit and go through some firsts in internet shopping history.
As for the first time a physical object was purchased over the internet, some people claim
it happened during the early 1970s. It was an online interaction between university students.
The problem was: the item being exchanged was an illicit drug. So, this definitely wasn’t
a legal online purchase, plus no actual money was involved.
By the 1980s, online auctions started to emerge. Before there were websites
devoted to online auctions, people were using sites with forums or chat rooms to auction
off their belongings online.
In 1984, an “Electronic Mall” opened, but it never became popular. It didn’t help
that dial-up was expensive and just 8% of American households even had a computer. The
mall sold items from various companies, including bookstores and department stores.
A decade later, in 1994, the first secure online shopping experience happened. A CD
was sold for $12.48 plus shipping. It went to a person in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
from the website’s headquarters in Nashua, New Hampshire. This was able to happen thanks
to a web browser, released that year, that could encrypt information on both sides of
the transaction.
In 1998, electronic stamps became a thing in the United States. Finally, people could
buy stamps over the internet, print them out, and place them on their outgoing mail. One
early idea for what to call this process was “mouse-mail.”
Two years after that, in 2000, the United States Census Bureau started tracking e-commerce
sales. They had data from the fourth quarter of 1999 that put sales at $5.3 billion.
And finally, apps got in the internet shopping game in 2008. Before we had convenient shopping
apps, people had to use regular internet browsing on their phones or computers.
We’re going to finish today’s episode with a story about one of the first online
purchases. One of the less illegal ones. All the way back in 1984, a 72-year-old woman
with a broken hip bought groceries online. That’s five years before the world wide
web was even invented.
A man in the UK had implemented the system in her home, with the hopes that it would
take off and help other people with mobility problems. The system connected her television
set to the internet. In his words, “What we effectively did was to take a domestic
TV in a home and turn it into a computer terminal.”
So, he switched out the TV remote with one that looked pretty much exactly the same.
There was just one small difference: a single button labeled “phone.” When the phone
button was pressed, three options were given. She could press 1, 2, or 3, depending on whether
she wanted to order from her supermarket, pharmacy, or bakery.
After choosing supermarket, she was able to scroll through 1,000 products. So, on the
day that she had the first online grocery shopping experience, she ordered margarine,
cereal, and eggs. Her phone line was used to give the order to the grocery store. Then,
employees at the store gathered the food and delivered it. When they did, she paid in cash
(which to some people, means this doesn’t count as online shopping because the money
wasn’t exchanged over the internet).
The inventor called it “teleshopping.” It was so simple because it was all done with
telephone numbers and technology that she was already familiar with. It only took her
fifteen minutes to learn how to do everything.
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