awesome! hahaha funny stuff. it's what the lounge is for, no?
pimpline.com is funny. paying by the inch is good.
and yah, perb is great forum for communicating. forums in general is great for communicating in a controlled, private way. if legalized, on social network sites would awesome too.
I think most of you are looking at this topic from a "buyer" point of view. I'm simply creating conversation from a business point of view, if this is/was a legalized business (like hotels), I wonder how it'd be like and whether it'd work - for both buyers and sellers. Obviously, we'd never really find out since a system like this requires "trust" and "reputation"!
the business model of Priceline is pretty awesome for both supply and demand sides. using hotels as example, generally, from the supply side has published prices for everyone to book and runs the business model on, but they have some fixed/sunk costs. Keeping it simple math, assuming to increase cost to revenue, if the hotel needs at least $1000 per night to cover at least those costs, and their published price per room is $400/night to ensure maintaining being a reputable luxury high end hotel in the market, then they need to sell 3 rooms per night ($1200 total). However, say, tomorrow night, hotel only has 2 rooms booked ($800), so they're $200 short. This is why Priceline has been so successfuly, it allows hotels to lower their price to a buyer at... in this example, 50% off to $200/night, and that rate is not published. It's a bid the buyer put in for an "unknown" luxury hotel. It helps them breakeven without decreasing their published rates where people who'd rather not risk the unknown and pay a published rate. I've never bid for anything but the 4 or 5 star hotels, so it's never really been a risk for me except a couple times location was not within walking distance of where I wanted to be.
if you read this far, i guess you are interested... so, I thought, hey, wouldn't it be cool for a SP to run their business because it's similar. they've got their real estate (rent/mortgage) to pay no matter how many clients they sell to. What happens on those nights that are not busy, they're screwed, because they don't want to lower their prices for the long term, and a Priceline system could help with it.
anyway
my mind is always on the selling side, as I actually don't shop that much (buying). it's why i've got some extra money to spend on SPs! hahaha it's interesting to see that all responses were looking at benefits of buying and not looking at benefits of selling. a system only works long term, or any business, when there's win-win. If it's one sided, it doesn't last very long.