Fukubukuro will never be fair

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Just a quick note, this is not a technical explanation of why Fuku isn't fair but a philosophical one. For the technical stuff, check out @shawn's post.


A lot of y'all seem pretty pissed off that you couldn't get a Fukubukuro. In a way that is the best possible indicator that the event was a success. We sold something that so many of you want so badly that you're mad as hell when you couldn't get one, so…thanks!

But don't we want you to be happy? Of course we do, but we are a start up and we have very limited resources. That means picking and choosing what we spend those resources on. The cost (time, money, and effort) to get the site to run completely smoothly for the short time it would take for a Fuku to sell out is really high. And doing that would mean we couldn't spend nearly as much time, money, and effort working on launching other sites and experiments (such as the Ambivalanche).

One option we have is to stop doing Fuku all together so we can actually get all of this work on other sites we want to do done.

Or everyone can understand that when Fuku happens the site will be slow and crash for a while and we can keep doing Fukus and all of those other fun things. Hint: this is the one we like the best.

That said, we totally agree that 2 hours of service downtime isn't cool. @shawn goes into detail here about why the crashing happened, and why it's not quite as simple as "buy more servers."

Even after all of these optimizations are done, when the site is getting as hammered as hard as it does with the amount of infrastructure we have some downtime during Fukus isn't just expected, but totally acceptable in our eyes.

As @shawn's post mentions, once stuff was working we sold 870 of them in 145 seconds. How boring would it be if everything worked right away and it was all over that fast? Where would the thrill of the chase be?

The real core of this is what it's always been -- there are more of you than we have, or can have, Fukus. There really is no good solution to this.

This last point applies to much more than Fukubukuro, but it's still relevant to mention here: if you want retail service and retail availability, you have to pay retail price.

Could we sell a box of predetermined goods at a very slight discount to 10,000 people? Sure.

Do we want to? Nope.

We'd rather send out a bunch of random, crazy shit to a few of you, so that's exactly what we're going to do. But don't get too excited, it'll probably be total crap.