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Or maybe they get the viral promotion without selling any of these at such a lose. Until it’s in your hands, Amazon has the right to correct any errors in pricing. This wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened.
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LOL, lucky are those that has managed to purchase the said lens.
the trouble with having this kind of variable is can you shake it down
or just take the horse to the stable
I boycotted Amazon in solidarity with striking workers, but perhaps I’d have hit Amazon harder if I’d participated?
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It would be really interesting to get an estimate for the number of Canon lenses ordered. These are produced in far smaller amounts than consumer lenses. So, suppose that some court orders Amazon to fulfill all orders, it might take years to actually produce them. Can/will Amazon then sue Canon??
How are such cases usually handled in the US? If such an obvious error is made by the seller, can the buyer insist on the deal? I mean, Amazon could pay this out of petty cash, but for other companies this could be their ruin.
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A company that “saves” as in “evades”, billions of dollars in taxes by engaging in “creative” accounting does not make this type of mistake.
It could be an outlier result from the automatic algorithm that calculates the prices, but somehow I doubt it, any discount of that magnitude should be automatically flagged to be reviewed before being posted to the auction.
So, in the end it cost them a few million? just wait until this goes viral
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Came for the outrage; stayed for the poo jokes.
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I find that if I procrastinate about a purchase, the next time I view the item it is adjusted in price (usually higher ). I bought a book a few months ago that was 100$; I looked at it a couple times to read the reviews, and when I actually bought it it was up to 115$. Still the same number of copies on hand ( six, it was a slow seller ). I have the same problem with a widely distributed product I buy regularly; I shop around and if I don’t keep the window open on the best price, when in the same session I go back to that vendor ( which may be Amazon store ) it may be higher 
. Other aspects of their marketing algorithm don’t impress me, though. The ads that follow me around the internet often try to sell me a book I’ve already bought, or lamps. I bought a lamp from them years ago, now it’s “LAMPS!!! This guy loves 'em !!! Show him all we got!!! LAMPS LAMPS LAMPS !!!”
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I missed it. You failed me, Boing Boing! 
Damn! With lenses like that I would buy a camera to fit them too.
Honest to God, I purchased a Squatty Potty from Amazon back in early 2017 Spring, and I requested refund with nothing particular conveyed in my message, certainly void of complaint, yet they simply issued full refund immediately, with no questions asked, even allowing my continual ownership of it 🙎 
Their message was clear and concise!
Yup. That was my first thought: Losing, say, 100k of goods to an audience that documents their super finds is millions of dollars of advertising. It doesn’t have to go crazy viral, it just has to get noted, then maybe amplified a bit by a cagey advertising firm, and whammo!, every years, every third article about Prime day mentioned that Amazon just might make mistakes and price stuff crazy low and, doh, some people will shop a bit more. Seems to me that a smart reporter would stand a reasonable chance of sorting out if this was intentional or not. Was it immediately amplified and by who? Are there interesting patterns to what was discounted?
Amazon certainly could have made this kind of mistake and, yes, even as a straight up mistake, it might be useful marketing. But it’s also likely to be true that Amazon should have made this kind of “mistake”, that it’s just smart marketing.
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