How it works

There is one strawberry. It is being auctioned for one year. It opened at one cent. Whoever holds the top bid gets to write one short message, displayed on the front page above the strawberry, next to a name of their choosing.

That is the whole thing. The details below are just the details.

Bidding

A bid has to beat the current price, and it can raise it by at most one dollar or ten percent, whichever is larger. So from a penny you can bid anything up to $1.01, and from ten dollars you can bid up to eleven.

That cap exists for a reason. Without it, one person bids ten million dollars as a joke on the second day, never pays, and there is nothing left to watch for the remaining eleven months. The cap makes that impossible rather than merely against the rules.

You cannot outbid yourself. Somebody else has to take the top spot before you can bid again.

Bids cannot be cancelled

Once a bid is confirmed, it is final. It cannot be cancelled, retracted, lowered, or withdrawn. There is no undo and no cooling-off period.

This matters more here than at a normal auction, because this one runs for a year. A bid you place in month two is still binding in month eleven, and the countdown will have been on screen the whole time.

So the rule is simple: if you are not sure you want to pay it, do not bid it. The increment cap helps, since no single click can commit you to much more than the price already showing.

Confirming a bid

The first time you bid, you get an email with a link. The bid is not real until you click it, and the price is checked again at that moment rather than when you typed it. If somebody passed you in between, the page says so and offers you the new minimum.

After that first confirmation your browser remembers you for ninety days, and bidding is one click.

There is no card field on this site

You are never asked for a card, and you are never charged. Bidding takes an amount, a name, a message and an email address, and that is the entire list. There is no checkout and nothing here that could bill anybody.

The winner is invoiced by email once the auction ends, and pays that invoice directly. Everybody who was outbid owes nothing and hears nothing further about money.

Your message

One hundred and forty characters, shown with the name you pick and the time you bid. Your email is never displayed.

Messages are screened on submission. Links, phone numbers, and email addresses are rejected outright, and you will be told immediately so you can fix it. Anything that looks like harassment, threats, or somebody else’s personal information is held for review, and the previous message stays up in the meantime.

A held message does not affect your bid. If you are winning, you are still winning. Only the words wait.

Every message that has ever been on the front page stays in the ledger, including the ones that have long since been outbid.

The end

The auction ends one year after it began, on a fixed date, at a fixed time. There is no extension and no anti-sniping rule. If somebody takes it from you in the last ten seconds, they have won it.

The winner gets an email carrying an invoice, and has thirty days to pay it and give a shipping address. If those thirty days pass with nothing, the bid is forfeited and it goes to the next highest bidder, who gets fourteen days on the same terms.

What actually arrives

Once payment has cleared, one single strawberry is mailed to the address you give. Continental United States only.

Its condition varies and is not guaranteed. It might arrive fresh. It might arrive bruised, soft, or entirely past it. It is a strawberry and it is going through the post, and no promise is made about which of those you get.

You are bidding on the strawberry and on the year spent waiting for it, not on its quality. Do not eat it.