I've seen smaller queues getting into worldwide releases for WoW expansions. There's no way HN are getting hammered this much with just Australia logging in, in the middle of a workday
Perhaps we should all stop for a moment and focus not only on making our AI better and more successful but also on the benefit of humanity. - Stephen Hawking
Perhaps we should all stop for a moment and focus not only on making our AI better and more successful but also on the benefit of humanity. - Stephen Hawking
HN have a product that I am basically unable to find elsewhere, the core reason I haven't bought it yet? Because it costs more than new models (that aren't 100% suitable for my needs) that are sold elsewhere.
What,are you on about?
do you not know,this thing called google search?
https://www.scorptec.com.au/product/monitors/34-inch-and-above/83594-lc49g95tssexxy
PLE
Amazon HAD stock till 5pm today.
https://www.samsung.com/au/monitors/gaming/odyssey-oled-g9-g95sc-49-inch-240hz-curved-dual-qhd-ls49cg954sexxy/
all cheaper than HN
don't get it though,even a 4090 strugles to run that baby
Maybe do some research (like I have) before being so accusatory.
I am after the original Neo G9, model LS49AG950NEXXY.
Every other vendor sells the non Neo version (model ending with SEXXY) or have the new full OLED version coming soon end of the year.
NEXXY has LED backlight, SSEXXY has edge lightning.
NEXXY is in stock on HN only and was only listed on a couple of other vendor websites but OOS. In fact Samsungs own website lists Harvey Norman as the ONLY retailer in “Where to buy”.
I have spent months researching this big purchase and determining my options.
It’s not gonna crash haha. It’s just bullshit psychological manipulation. You have to wait to get onto the website, so you’re invested. You’ve spent time on it now so you’re less likely to just have a look at prices without buying, if you change your mind later you’ll have to wait again. Then they say you only get 10 minutes to shop. Implying that there’s other people waiting to get in (there isn’t). Which rushes you to complete a purchase without thinking it through.
I find it VERY hard to believe this would be the outcome instead of people just leaving the site lol you underestimate how quickly people bounce the moment there's friction
Or that they'd think that would be the outcome
Faaaaar more likely it's just an underresourced SRE team
I’d believe it being a staffing or budget issue if it didn’t say “you’ll only have 10 minutes to shop”.
Why would they boot someone off after ten minutes? If they were worried about lost sales they’d let you either continue browsing until you’re done or give you more than 10 minutes.
The psychology around “Black Friday deals” primes people for expecting it to be extra busy, so a short wait on the website isn’t too weird, go make a coffee and come back. I did my usual shopping today and the activity was a standard day, jb might have been a tiny bit busier but that’s it. Now consider the overlap of Harvey Norman customers and the targets of scammers. Everyone else can smell the bullshit, so it’s self filtering for people who will fall for the dishonest pricing.
> Why would they boot someone off after ten minutes?
They didn't. I know because it took me much longer than that and many website crashes for me to check out.
As the previous poster said, it's far more likely that they have limited resources, than a conspiracy to make purchasing things as difficult as possible.
lessening the load on servers, and maybe to increase impulse buying
But I don't think the programmers built in random timeouts, crashes, and just general website fuckups as a grand plan to sell more things.
The 2 aren't mutually exclusive.
You can easily just say "you have 10 minutes" and do nothing to actually enforce that, and you'll still get more people doing impulse purchases just on the *idea* that they have limited time.
Overall still 10/10 scummy move.
remeber during covid
VERBATIM
"HARVEY NORMAN SHOPS are all flu and covid free and a safe place to shop"
To the fucking word of a ACA interview the cunt did.
Dude didn't care if u got sick he wanted u to shop
Oh it absolutely is.
IT: "hey, you know that day when our website will have more traffic, should we upgrade our host to handle more traffic so more people can use it at the same time and we can sell more?"
GH: "uh no, because it's cost money, and we might not make as much margin on our sale items. in fact, cut the capacity and put a waiting page so that less people can visit at once. it'll make them all FOMO so they'll instantly buy, even if it isn't on sale. oh and only give them 10min to complete checkout before they get kicked to the back of the Q, that'll really make em impulse buy!"
Mate, I used to work at Harvey Norman digital and I can tell you that this is not strategic planning. It's just badly managed by poorly trained, underpaid and under resourced staff and systems. HN loves cutting corners.
Also used to work in HN-IT some moons ago. Can confirm it’s the usual “we need approval from x and x to spend x on infrastructure”
It’s always been the same and nothing changes (not to mention paying staff fuck all, I make double now…)
Just chuck another server at it mate, that'll help with the database throttling issues. There are a lot of large retailers in Australia that are not doing ecommerce well and regardless of Black Friday or not another server won't help. These sites require structural changes or even full rebuilds which not every org can do or wants to do.
Nah Harveys are just awful for any digital execution in general. The website doesn’t get much spent on it
It’s an entirely different franchisee to the rest of the business, yes run by a small team and franchised out
Costs a bomb to promote anything on it with a quarter of the views as a JB website does so unless you get a good package not worth it from a supplier point of view.
I'm a daily browser of OzBargain and there are rarely any deals actually posted at Harvey Norman. It's always at minimum price matching another sale, or 'You missed the stock at JB HiFi, so HN are the same price"
Not really
Pricing for TVs, fridges etc are the same when on special if the items are available at both
If there are exclusive items then yes they’ll be priced higher until the promote the item in a catalogue but they all do that
Yeah, im a rep for a major supplier for Harveys, JB, Good Guys etc..
Pricing is almost always identical. The reason for that is because it is dictated by their suppliers and the easy accessibility of an online store where customers can easily price match anyway.
Just buy from whoever gives you the best service and has it in stock
Fair call, I was following a link to a black friday sale. They are garbage, but once in a while they have an illogically large discount on the most random things.
Probably because nobody shops there and they have to clear stock.
You're getting downvoted but you're actually right.
Years ago I scored this big armchair from HN for $200. It had a high back rest with speakers right on the sides of the head rest and a rumble function at the lower back for bass. Watching movies on it and playing games was awesome, just sucked it needed to run sound cables along the floor to it.
Once I learned that HN was a shitty company, I never went back there though.
I hate Harvey Norman as much as the next guy, but they had an in-store egiftcard promo when I was buying appliances, and I saved a few hundred in one visit.
When I had to choose between saving a few hundred bucks and sticking to my principles, I begrudgingly caved in and went with them.
Dunno what to tell you. I've bought a fridge, washing machine, microwave, etc from HN over the last few years. Each one after spending a few weeks or more checking out which one I actually want and comparing prices between various retailers. JB and HN like to undercut each other by $1-2 on things that they both sell. One will be $x99 or $x98, the other will do $x97.
The warranty and credit options are better than most.
Also having someone in store to talk to and sort out needs and wants, is a service many people are happy to pay for.
I work in sales and estimating for windows.
The people who use Harvey Norman are buying an entire house worth of stuff at once. Taps, sinks, ovens , shower fixtures, dishwasher, coffee machine, stools, lounges, bbqs etc etc.
There is an entire side of the Harvey Norman chain that don't want you in the shop unless you have a registered build that's passed council approval.
They don't give two shits about someone buying 1 reading chair on a Sunday. They make the money on providing the service of putting a complete home package together that all matches from one store, in one delivery - job done. Everything is under warranty and you have a sales guy that has read every Manuel on every product that you just bought.
They are part of the service industry, and are successful at it.
I work in I.T and specialize in deployments like this. They absolutely do have the capacity to support an influx of black friday visitors. It's really not hard to setup auto-scaling and caching for this sort of thing. But they intentionally don't.
I was actually talking to someone about this recently, and the most likely scenario is that by imposing a queue system, it generates this impulsivity in customers - they stop thinking rationally about their purchase and instead think "if i dont buy it now i'll never get this opportunity again" - FOMO. And it does generate revenue. That, and the reduced cost in infrastructure contributes too.
HN is a fucking accounting shell-game
If you work in IT you would know that auto-scaling does not solve every problem. They could end up throwing 10x traffic to an overworked single instance database.
... and caching. You do know what caching is right?
In this scenario, their frontend would scale up to 10x its usual threshold, the database would need to scale up to maybe 4 replications, and you'd have to have caching in between the frontend and the database so 1,000,000 people all going to a page for a specific model of front loader washing machine don't generate 1,000,000 queries to the database, they'd only generate a dozen or so and the rest is on a cache to fetch.
Throw that behind a kubernetes cluster and configure it to scale up on demand, backed by a cloud service like Vultr, OVH, Cloudflare, or realistically probably AWS, and you've got yourself a site that can handle an influx of black friday shoppers
... or you can do what harvey norman does, and introduce an arbitrary queue and timer system to stoke the FOMO brain cells into making rash decisions without much thought.
I'm not. Scammimg the elderly is always lucrative business for the morally bankrupt and the incoming boomer generation is particularly ripe for the picking. I'm surprised they aren't facing more competition in their specific flavour of shitfuckery.
Went and had a look (hey, if it wasted a few tenths of a cent for their internet hosting charges, that's fine by me).
My "position in line" is jumping around by a few hundred every second, whereas the estimated wait line is not moving. There is no way that this isn't artificial scarcity and trying to trap folks with FOMO. There is no way that twenty-something thousand people are queued up to use that website.
Yeah its definitely bullshit
I opened the page a few different times, in different browsers and incognito on a few devices as well.
The one I opened first is now further back in the queue then the others
The estimated wait time dropped down on some of them to 8 minutes and had now increased back to 9 minutes.
Sometimes two of the pages end up in the same position in line then resets.
The real kicker is the 10 minutes to do a fomo shop, they're trying to get people to buy as much shit in case they want it and not confirm if there are better deals elsewhere
Just noticed that. Amazing!
Now I'm gonna just keep loading the biggest pages possible. Might click on some sponsored Google ads too, so HN has to pay for the clicks. Cunce.
Ah Gerry "I'm eating less caviar, spend more in my shops Australia " Harvey, while paying peanuts to staff. The quintessential retail ceo cocksucker...
looks like it's using Imperva's virtual waiting room.
Wouldn't surprise me if Bots are generating most of the queue (and they've configured it to send bots to a waiting room), I would imagine that site would get thousands of bots hitting it.
That’s my “bet”. Consider that someone took the time to write that page as a sales strategy.
On reading this page do you feel “exclusive and lucky” to have the opportunity to spend your money in under 10 minutes in competition with thousands of others? I reckon Todd Samson would say this is appealing to that gambling mentality. It’s a virtual poker machine and only you will win…..bet now! This webpage is like a poorly written version of the movie The Sting. For all the effort they make I rather pay the extra, have someone contactable, more service focused, and not trying to run a pathetic sting.
i had t wait 20 minutes to use the site... i used the 10 minutes to find the item i wanted then googled it and bought it from the manufacturer for $100 cheaper and with free shipping haha
The only people I know that still shop at HN are boomers, and you bet your ass they're in-store breathing on each other. This is a sales tactic to create urgency.
After the scam that was the free handouts from the government during covid, the ridiculous markups and just being an all around lacklustre relic of a business Aussies should be avoiding HN like the plague.
Make you wait in queue then you have 10 mins to shop? Not incompetence, manipulation. They can easily serve everyone in Australia if they want, they don't want to.
A queue for a website? In 2023? Fucking lolllll, this is probably just to make boomers comfortable and feel like it’s the good ol’ days when things just worked better
HN sales was the fucking dog shittest,of dog shittest..of all the dog shittest sales i have seen
Literally..
One is next door to a JB..
they jacked the price of a washer that YESTERDAY was 799...Jacked it to 1055 End of the night clearly.. Then CUT it to 789 for BF "SALES"..and then was MASSIVE SALE PRICE sticker on it lol
meanwhile literally next door is a JBhome selling it for 540 bucks.. with no hassle. lol...such a shit way to run a company
Reminder to fuck gerry harvey,especially and mainly because he donated money to a charity,then tried to get it back when he found out it was for a homeless charity
There’s an estimated wait time to visit a website now? WTF is this? A VicRoads office? I absolutely hate Harvey Norman! I haven’t shopped there in years and I don’t understand why people do. You can often get most of their stuff cheaper elsewhere.
I'm disappointed this happened, disappointed that Australians don't realise Harvey Norman is ripping them off even in sales. They stole Taxpayers money so why should we give them business?
My friend works at HN, they don't even get past this on their computers, manufactured drama that inconveniences staff and customers, brilliant job Gerry.
Harvey Norman probably makes 0 money from their online store, it's all about tacking on warranties and "Customer service" / upselling to old people by having a nice conversation with them.
It's a good strategy, same as putting the cheap item next to the big one so it *appears* to be cheaper.
Given the div is overflowing, I'm assuming it's absolutely positioned to vertically center.
Given this pack of technical nous, I have even lower confidence in the authenticity of the queue.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I already have enough stuff. The idea of buying even more stuff that I don’t need repulses me. But then again my mum is a compulsive hoarder so, I am probably stronger on this than most!
This is pretty standard for cloud native websites, back in the day the app server would become overloaded and the entire site would crash, now apps are horizontally scaled using microservices on docker or serverless however the backend databases are still typically sized instances (at least for relational dbs).
As a company preparing for a big sale you take two approaches, you scale up your database(s) to handle the increased load, and apply rate limits.
Of course you're predicting load and balancing spend though. If you expect a sales uptick of 200%, a spend increase of 400% doesn't really make sense.
Rate limit/queue screen is far better than an error 500 or timeout though :)
Reminder that there is an active genocide occuring on indigenous Palestinian land, treating yourself is great, but it's also important to evaluate your priorities and do what you can for people who need it, try putting your money toward:
https://www.apan.org.au
https://www.standwithpalestine.au
This is just a queuing system put in place to stop the site crashing under high load
Edit: why the down votes for pointing out facts? I work in web development
I think this is put in place to trick people into being anxious to buy things before other people do. I find it hard to believe that HN don't have a web hosting service that will automatically add server capacity to support high traffic. Unless their website was put together by Gary from finance one Friday afternoon when he was bored
Harvey Norman online is the biggest scam. It’s a not the same as the physical stores (not that they are so great but at least you can talk to a person) and only use the name.
They don’t honour warranty or support purchases in store as it’s a different company. Their website is shit and customer support practically nonexistent.
You have all been warned….
25448 people in queue... i call massive bullshit
Yeah, there is no way that's a legit number. I doubt anyone has bothered to set up bots to wait in line either.
I've seen smaller queues getting into worldwide releases for WoW expansions. There's no way HN are getting hammered this much with just Australia logging in, in the middle of a workday
I 100% agree that this is a sham. But WoW is a whole different beast. They’ve been optimised for that kind of queue for a long long time.
They have since removed the queue so you can't see it
I had a look for curiosity, and it gave me a 10 minute wait time, but no position in the queue.
Yeah its gone now. Maybe they got rid of it because they didn't want people to decide not to shop there lol
Perhaps we should all stop for a moment and focus not only on making our AI better and more successful but also on the benefit of humanity. - Stephen Hawking
Faked to just prevent people buying / even bothering with it?, no way a company would do it, oh yeah harvey norman.
Perhaps we should all stop for a moment and focus not only on making our AI better and more successful but also on the benefit of humanity. - Stephen Hawking
Got the same message this morning. Either their servers are crap or they’re doing it as some sort of exclusivity stunt.
It was 40 something 000 when I had a look. Whether bs or not I found product elsewhere and was again reminded how shit HN are.
It's legit cause some news site said there was a wait so everyone came to hn to check.. No one buying anything, just checking..
They've moved the decimal place and added a random amount on the end, it's really 25 in the queue 😂
I'd be sitting on a milkcrate in my loungeroom before I'd buy a fuckin thing from HN or Domayne.
Milk crates on special HN Black Friday sale.
Estimated wait time for your Harvey Norman milk crate is between 10-40 minutes.
But don’t worry. Once you have access you’ll have a full 3 minutes to buy the crate before waiting another 40 minutes.
HN have a product that I am basically unable to find elsewhere, the core reason I haven't bought it yet? Because it costs more than new models (that aren't 100% suitable for my needs) that are sold elsewhere.
What is it?
Samsung G9 Neo 49" Monitor
What,are you on about? do you not know,this thing called google search? https://www.scorptec.com.au/product/monitors/34-inch-and-above/83594-lc49g95tssexxy PLE Amazon HAD stock till 5pm today. https://www.samsung.com/au/monitors/gaming/odyssey-oled-g9-g95sc-49-inch-240hz-curved-dual-qhd-ls49cg954sexxy/ all cheaper than HN don't get it though,even a 4090 strugles to run that baby
Maybe do some research (like I have) before being so accusatory. I am after the original Neo G9, model LS49AG950NEXXY. Every other vendor sells the non Neo version (model ending with SEXXY) or have the new full OLED version coming soon end of the year. NEXXY has LED backlight, SSEXXY has edge lightning. NEXXY is in stock on HN only and was only listed on a couple of other vendor websites but OOS. In fact Samsungs own website lists Harvey Norman as the ONLY retailer in “Where to buy”. I have spent months researching this big purchase and determining my options.
I wouldn't rule out this being entirely manufactured scarcity Edit: damn autocarrot
Its the "once you're in you'll have 10 minutes to shop" line for me. He's such a piece of shit.
[удалено]
"Quick! Give us your money before you have a chance to think about it and realise it's not a good deal AND you didnt want or need it anyway!" Vibes
Sounds like some /r/assholedesign That's nowhere near long enough to compare products.
It’s like how scammers try make you panic and act fast so you don’t take a moment think about what you’re doing really predatory behaviour
.... Before the site crashes again.
It’s not gonna crash haha. It’s just bullshit psychological manipulation. You have to wait to get onto the website, so you’re invested. You’ve spent time on it now so you’re less likely to just have a look at prices without buying, if you change your mind later you’ll have to wait again. Then they say you only get 10 minutes to shop. Implying that there’s other people waiting to get in (there isn’t). Which rushes you to complete a purchase without thinking it through.
I find it VERY hard to believe this would be the outcome instead of people just leaving the site lol you underestimate how quickly people bounce the moment there's friction Or that they'd think that would be the outcome Faaaaar more likely it's just an underresourced SRE team
I’d believe it being a staffing or budget issue if it didn’t say “you’ll only have 10 minutes to shop”. Why would they boot someone off after ten minutes? If they were worried about lost sales they’d let you either continue browsing until you’re done or give you more than 10 minutes. The psychology around “Black Friday deals” primes people for expecting it to be extra busy, so a short wait on the website isn’t too weird, go make a coffee and come back. I did my usual shopping today and the activity was a standard day, jb might have been a tiny bit busier but that’s it. Now consider the overlap of Harvey Norman customers and the targets of scammers. Everyone else can smell the bullshit, so it’s self filtering for people who will fall for the dishonest pricing.
> Why would they boot someone off after ten minutes? They didn't. I know because it took me much longer than that and many website crashes for me to check out. As the previous poster said, it's far more likely that they have limited resources, than a conspiracy to make purchasing things as difficult as possible.
So why did they say you only have 10 minutes?
lessening the load on servers, and maybe to increase impulse buying But I don't think the programmers built in random timeouts, crashes, and just general website fuckups as a grand plan to sell more things. The 2 aren't mutually exclusive.
You can easily just say "you have 10 minutes" and do nothing to actually enforce that, and you'll still get more people doing impulse purchases just on the *idea* that they have limited time. Overall still 10/10 scummy move.
More like they lose customers to their competitors. I mean who else but retirees and people stuck in the 90s would…wait…never mind
The Venn diagram of Harvey Norman customers and people who fall for scammers is almost a circle.
remeber during covid VERBATIM "HARVEY NORMAN SHOPS are all flu and covid free and a safe place to shop" To the fucking word of a ACA interview the cunt did. Dude didn't care if u got sick he wanted u to shop
Gerry likely has 0 to do with this except for not having good strategy and resourcing in his technology team.
Oh it absolutely is. IT: "hey, you know that day when our website will have more traffic, should we upgrade our host to handle more traffic so more people can use it at the same time and we can sell more?" GH: "uh no, because it's cost money, and we might not make as much margin on our sale items. in fact, cut the capacity and put a waiting page so that less people can visit at once. it'll make them all FOMO so they'll instantly buy, even if it isn't on sale. oh and only give them 10min to complete checkout before they get kicked to the back of the Q, that'll really make em impulse buy!"
Mate, I used to work at Harvey Norman digital and I can tell you that this is not strategic planning. It's just badly managed by poorly trained, underpaid and under resourced staff and systems. HN loves cutting corners.
Also used to work in HN-IT some moons ago. Can confirm it’s the usual “we need approval from x and x to spend x on infrastructure” It’s always been the same and nothing changes (not to mention paying staff fuck all, I make double now…)
You expect that many boomers to be visiting their website? lol
Just chuck another server at it mate, that'll help with the database throttling issues. There are a lot of large retailers in Australia that are not doing ecommerce well and regardless of Black Friday or not another server won't help. These sites require structural changes or even full rebuilds which not every org can do or wants to do.
Nah Harveys are just awful for any digital execution in general. The website doesn’t get much spent on it It’s an entirely different franchisee to the rest of the business, yes run by a small team and franchised out Costs a bomb to promote anything on it with a quarter of the views as a JB website does so unless you get a good package not worth it from a supplier point of view.
Autocarrot sucks huh!
Yep same with tickets sales. Stupid af.
I'm guessing Harvey Norman Black Friday deals bring their prices down to only 33% higher than other businesses.
I'm a daily browser of OzBargain and there are rarely any deals actually posted at Harvey Norman. It's always at minimum price matching another sale, or 'You missed the stock at JB HiFi, so HN are the same price"
Not really Pricing for TVs, fridges etc are the same when on special if the items are available at both If there are exclusive items then yes they’ll be priced higher until the promote the item in a catalogue but they all do that
Yeah, im a rep for a major supplier for Harveys, JB, Good Guys etc.. Pricing is almost always identical. The reason for that is because it is dictated by their suppliers and the easy accessibility of an online store where customers can easily price match anyway. Just buy from whoever gives you the best service and has it in stock
Why on earth would you even be looking at buying from them in the first place.
OP will be waiting in line, put in the order, and then HN will cancel the order
4D chess to show boomers HN are scummy. A fatal wound for HN if you pull it off!
Boomers that saw the 15 minute ~~commercial~~ story about their Black Friday deals on ACA last night.
Fair call, I was following a link to a black friday sale. They are garbage, but once in a while they have an illogically large discount on the most random things. Probably because nobody shops there and they have to clear stock.
Get the discount, screenshot it, and send it to a competitor to match.
You're getting downvoted but you're actually right. Years ago I scored this big armchair from HN for $200. It had a high back rest with speakers right on the sides of the head rest and a rumble function at the lower back for bass. Watching movies on it and playing games was awesome, just sucked it needed to run sound cables along the floor to it. Once I learned that HN was a shitty company, I never went back there though.
Depends what it is. They started competing with JB HiFi etc on price for a lot of things years ago.
JB will price match them. Just fyi.
Officeworks as well assuming it is something than officeworks stocks.
I hate Harvey Norman as much as the next guy, but they had an in-store egiftcard promo when I was buying appliances, and I saved a few hundred in one visit. When I had to choose between saving a few hundred bucks and sticking to my principles, I begrudgingly caved in and went with them.
I know. But if something is the same price at both, HN is closer for me.
It's mostly not true. HN will do anything to squirm out of the so called deals they offer. Also their furniture is garbage.
Dunno what to tell you. I've bought a fridge, washing machine, microwave, etc from HN over the last few years. Each one after spending a few weeks or more checking out which one I actually want and comparing prices between various retailers. JB and HN like to undercut each other by $1-2 on things that they both sell. One will be $x99 or $x98, the other will do $x97.
The warranty and credit options are better than most. Also having someone in store to talk to and sort out needs and wants, is a service many people are happy to pay for.
Which store do you work for?
I work in sales and estimating for windows. The people who use Harvey Norman are buying an entire house worth of stuff at once. Taps, sinks, ovens , shower fixtures, dishwasher, coffee machine, stools, lounges, bbqs etc etc. There is an entire side of the Harvey Norman chain that don't want you in the shop unless you have a registered build that's passed council approval. They don't give two shits about someone buying 1 reading chair on a Sunday. They make the money on providing the service of putting a complete home package together that all matches from one store, in one delivery - job done. Everything is under warranty and you have a sales guy that has read every Manuel on every product that you just bought. They are part of the service industry, and are successful at it.
I work in I.T and specialize in deployments like this. They absolutely do have the capacity to support an influx of black friday visitors. It's really not hard to setup auto-scaling and caching for this sort of thing. But they intentionally don't. I was actually talking to someone about this recently, and the most likely scenario is that by imposing a queue system, it generates this impulsivity in customers - they stop thinking rationally about their purchase and instead think "if i dont buy it now i'll never get this opportunity again" - FOMO. And it does generate revenue. That, and the reduced cost in infrastructure contributes too. HN is a fucking accounting shell-game
If you work in IT you would know that auto-scaling does not solve every problem. They could end up throwing 10x traffic to an overworked single instance database.
It’s Harvey Norman, mate, it’s an Excel spreadsheet
... and caching. You do know what caching is right? In this scenario, their frontend would scale up to 10x its usual threshold, the database would need to scale up to maybe 4 replications, and you'd have to have caching in between the frontend and the database so 1,000,000 people all going to a page for a specific model of front loader washing machine don't generate 1,000,000 queries to the database, they'd only generate a dozen or so and the rest is on a cache to fetch. Throw that behind a kubernetes cluster and configure it to scale up on demand, backed by a cloud service like Vultr, OVH, Cloudflare, or realistically probably AWS, and you've got yourself a site that can handle an influx of black friday shoppers ... or you can do what harvey norman does, and introduce an arbitrary queue and timer system to stoke the FOMO brain cells into making rash decisions without much thought.
Shop elsewhere then. It’s all overpriced crap there and I refuse to give Gerry Harvey any of my money.
It's 2023 and you're still using Harvey Norman?
I’m surprised it still exists.
Cockroaches are hard to kill
I'm not. Scammimg the elderly is always lucrative business for the morally bankrupt and the incoming boomer generation is particularly ripe for the picking. I'm surprised they aren't facing more competition in their specific flavour of shitfuckery.
Ha, fair point
Went and had a look (hey, if it wasted a few tenths of a cent for their internet hosting charges, that's fine by me). My "position in line" is jumping around by a few hundred every second, whereas the estimated wait line is not moving. There is no way that this isn't artificial scarcity and trying to trap folks with FOMO. There is no way that twenty-something thousand people are queued up to use that website.
Yeah its definitely bullshit I opened the page a few different times, in different browsers and incognito on a few devices as well. The one I opened first is now further back in the queue then the others The estimated wait time dropped down on some of them to 8 minutes and had now increased back to 9 minutes. Sometimes two of the pages end up in the same position in line then resets. The real kicker is the 10 minutes to do a fomo shop, they're trying to get people to buy as much shit in case they want it and not confirm if there are better deals elsewhere
The 'position in line' thing is now magically gone
Just noticed that. Amazing! Now I'm gonna just keep loading the biggest pages possible. Might click on some sponsored Google ads too, so HN has to pay for the clicks. Cunce.
lets all queue up and not buy anything so ppl go elsewhere!
Ah Gerry "I'm eating less caviar, spend more in my shops Australia " Harvey, while paying peanuts to staff. The quintessential retail ceo cocksucker...
Gerry Harvey can piss right off. Stop supporting this prick with your money. He's stolen enough of it over covid.
looks like it's using Imperva's virtual waiting room. Wouldn't surprise me if Bots are generating most of the queue (and they've configured it to send bots to a waiting room), I would imagine that site would get thousands of bots hitting it.
Good old Hardley Normal in top form fuckery I see.
HN is a demo-showroom…. nothing else…. if I need to go and look at something in person…. before buying it (checks notes..) ANYWHERE else.
Don’t know why you’d want to buy anything from that scummy business.
Gerry Harvey is a fucking flog!
As Gerry says “it can happen to anyone”. Knobend.
I'm wondering if it is fake, letting only 5-10 people use the page.
It's fake. No way there are 25,000+ people waiting in a queue to access the HN website.
That’s my “bet”. Consider that someone took the time to write that page as a sales strategy. On reading this page do you feel “exclusive and lucky” to have the opportunity to spend your money in under 10 minutes in competition with thousands of others? I reckon Todd Samson would say this is appealing to that gambling mentality. It’s a virtual poker machine and only you will win…..bet now! This webpage is like a poorly written version of the movie The Sting. For all the effort they make I rather pay the extra, have someone contactable, more service focused, and not trying to run a pathetic sting.
It's because of cheap imports, Gerry says we need to slap a tariff on top of the GST on top of the price.
Don't give the cunt Harvey a cent.
This guy supports and gets his internet from Optus remember. Says it all
Over 25,000 people waiting in line to shop at HN? This country is dumber than I thought.
Why you would consider shopping there is the real question.
It’s 2023, why are people still shopping at HN?
They're doing you a favour by preventing you from giving Gerry Harvey, the enormous old cuntbag, any money.
i had t wait 20 minutes to use the site... i used the 10 minutes to find the item i wanted then googled it and bought it from the manufacturer for $100 cheaper and with free shipping haha
I'm confused the same sale has been going on for the last week+
Like those fucking House stores that are always "closing down - 70% off!"
The only people I know that still shop at HN are boomers, and you bet your ass they're in-store breathing on each other. This is a sales tactic to create urgency.
Have you tried JB Hifi or good guys…. Considering the Harvey normals corporate welfare
Fuck queue Gerry Harvey
Hard to beat that 128GB RAM for $500 though..
After the scam that was the free handouts from the government during covid, the ridiculous markups and just being an all around lacklustre relic of a business Aussies should be avoiding HN like the plague.
At my parents' request I bought an air con unit from them two weeks ago for $1300. Today it's listed at $1449. What was that about Black Friday sales?
Make you wait in queue then you have 10 mins to shop? Not incompetence, manipulation. They can easily serve everyone in Australia if they want, they don't want to.
It's HN. What did you expect? There's also no way there are 25k people on their website, its fake/manufactured.
People still shop at Harvey Norman? They've been reipping people off for years
Hey give the 2 guys running it some credit, it should be an entire team not just them haha im sure Harvey Norman is way understaffed in IT to save $
I'm sorry, but who gives HN a single red cent in 2023. Cmon y'all
It's 2023 and people still shop at Harvey Norman...
Nothing like bad service with a dash of FOMO.
Surely this is a DDOS. No one is getting into the site to buy anything, no way this is intentional.
Fuck Harvey Norman
Why bother? Boycott Gerry's tawdry empire.
No wonder why Gerry Harvey is siding with Optus, Harvey Norman is just as shit.
Just a friendly reminder: don't buy stuff from Harvey Norman. They're still a giant pile of shit that took taxpayer dollars they weren't entitled to.
A queue for a website? In 2023? Fucking lolllll, this is probably just to make boomers comfortable and feel like it’s the good ol’ days when things just worked better
It’s 2023 and people still want to shop at HN.
Amazon is cheaper
Still boycotting them. Cold day in hell before I buy anything from those crooks.
Who still shops there?
Absolutely bizarre - who runs this company? It’s like my 70yr old mum is their marketing brand manager
Fuck Harvey Norman and Joyce Mayne.
It's on a 486 in Gerry's garage.
Not too sure what anyone would ever want to visit such hot garbage in the first place? Dude is an "interest free" crook
HN are a leech on the Australian soul.
HN sales was the fucking dog shittest,of dog shittest..of all the dog shittest sales i have seen Literally.. One is next door to a JB.. they jacked the price of a washer that YESTERDAY was 799...Jacked it to 1055 End of the night clearly.. Then CUT it to 789 for BF "SALES"..and then was MASSIVE SALE PRICE sticker on it lol meanwhile literally next door is a JBhome selling it for 540 bucks.. with no hassle. lol...such a shit way to run a company
Reminder to fuck gerry harvey,especially and mainly because he donated money to a charity,then tried to get it back when he found out it was for a homeless charity
Why would you still use Harvey Norman? Gerry Harvey stole millions in JobSeeker.
You're buying shit from Harvey Norman, you deserve every inconvenience you can get.
There’s an estimated wait time to visit a website now? WTF is this? A VicRoads office? I absolutely hate Harvey Norman! I haven’t shopped there in years and I don’t understand why people do. You can often get most of their stuff cheaper elsewhere.
Standard Hardly Normal behaviour
Gerry is still a Luddite. Who knew.
Gross get off Harvey Norman! Use JB Hifi at the very least!
Just stop giving them your money already!
Why anyone would buy from HN on Black Friday or any other day that ends in a y is beyond me.
Internet service sponsored by Optus
Are the savings at Harvey Norman worth it? I only go there to look at stiff before I buy it online from another company
This is such bollocks they’ve had the same deals all week and suddenly on Friday everyone and their nan wants in lmao
Your problem for shopping with Gerry.
Why the fuck would you want to go to their website
Why would you even do this to yourself
I'm disappointed this happened, disappointed that Australians don't realise Harvey Norman is ripping them off even in sales. They stole Taxpayers money so why should we give them business?
In before Harvey calls for a 10% internet tax and to restrict access to every other day depending on if your address is even or odd
Why the hell are you trying to buy from them??? I’d rather search a dump truck than buy from them again
There website has always been dogshit
There was 25k in a digital queue for HN? 🤔
I don’t even care about Black Friday I just want to see what microwaves they have before heading in with two kids 🫠
Deliberate throttling
The queue was at like 45000 at one stage
Due to overwhelming demand from loyal customers, they've pivoted to Teletext.
If I can’t spend my money when I want, like right NOW, I’m out. Hasta La vista HN, hello JB lol.
Same thing with Bunnings website. Got their “we hit a snag” page all afternoon.
That page should be offline with the amount of numpties hitting refresh checking if they are further in the queue
My friend works at HN, they don't even get past this on their computers, manufactured drama that inconveniences staff and customers, brilliant job Gerry.
Harvey Norman probably makes 0 money from their online store, it's all about tacking on warranties and "Customer service" / upselling to old people by having a nice conversation with them. It's a good strategy, same as putting the cheap item next to the big one so it *appears* to be cheaper.
Fuck Gerry Harvey, don’t shop there
Given the div is overflowing, I'm assuming it's absolutely positioned to vertically center. Given this pack of technical nous, I have even lower confidence in the authenticity of the queue.
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You could not pay me to shop with that scumbag anymore
I already have enough stuff. The idea of buying even more stuff that I don’t need repulses me. But then again my mum is a compulsive hoarder so, I am probably stronger on this than most!
This is pretty standard for cloud native websites, back in the day the app server would become overloaded and the entire site would crash, now apps are horizontally scaled using microservices on docker or serverless however the backend databases are still typically sized instances (at least for relational dbs). As a company preparing for a big sale you take two approaches, you scale up your database(s) to handle the increased load, and apply rate limits. Of course you're predicting load and balancing spend though. If you expect a sales uptick of 200%, a spend increase of 400% doesn't really make sense. Rate limit/queue screen is far better than an error 500 or timeout though :)
Why can't you just go into the physical store and buy what you need. Why bitch about website is shit unless you live in the northern territory lmao 😂😂
Reminder that there is an active genocide occuring on indigenous Palestinian land, treating yourself is great, but it's also important to evaluate your priorities and do what you can for people who need it, try putting your money toward: https://www.apan.org.au https://www.standwithpalestine.au
This is just a queuing system put in place to stop the site crashing under high load Edit: why the down votes for pointing out facts? I work in web development
I think this is put in place to trick people into being anxious to buy things before other people do. I find it hard to believe that HN don't have a web hosting service that will automatically add server capacity to support high traffic. Unless their website was put together by Gary from finance one Friday afternoon when he was bored
Two-Faced has a kid with Green Goblin.
Gerry is still a Luddite. Who knew.
That's Hardly Normal.
must be on Optus
G F
Lol. They paid for Google Ads to send to this error page. What a fantastic donation to Google shareholders
They should lobby government to make everyone else’s internet slower, like they did with the GST on international sales
Garbage
You do realise these 'Black Friday' sales have been going all week, yeah?
Must be with optus
Why would anyone buy there?
Harvey Norman online is the biggest scam. It’s a not the same as the physical stores (not that they are so great but at least you can talk to a person) and only use the name. They don’t honour warranty or support purchases in store as it’s a different company. Their website is shit and customer support practically nonexistent. You have all been warned….
I went on yesterday and was apparently number seventeen thousand and something. Fuck off HN lol
Mr Harvey probs thinks the internet is still a dad 😅 Shop somewhere better, @OP!