As mentioned here, T-Shirt Hell was supposedly closing up shop because of angry commentators. At the time there was speculation on the original TechCrunch story that this might be a ploy to bump up sales in a normally slow post-holiday season. Turns out the stunt has been shown to be true (thanks Andy). Ridiculous. The creator even called it “his personal stimulus package”. From the Wired story:
Why in the world would I shut down a website that brings so much satisfaction to people who actually have a sense of humor? To customers who can’t stand this ever-expanding, politically correct asylum we are imprisoned in? To women and children and men and farm animals who not only love what we do, but who cherish the fact that we CAN do it? Yes, we can. F*ck you if you can’t take a joke.
There’s nothing I can do about Sunshine Megatron using deceptive practices to increase sales. There’s also nothing I can do about the spate of press t-shirt bloggers gave the site after the initial announcement. Finally, there will always be a guilt that I actually felt a smidgen sorry for whatever abuse that drove him to “close” his shop.
What I can do, however, is refuse to cover any T-Shirt Hell related news or tees in the future. Sunshine played the blogsphere (and tee bloggers in particular) to the tune of approximately 100,000 shirt sales. If I’m going to be referring traffic I’d prefer that it be because of a great design or killer store concept than for a stunt. I hope my other t-shirt bloggers share the same sentiment – its in the best interest of the readers.
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9 Comments
Agreed.
I couldn’t agree more with you. I keep the same line of never-posting-about-t-shirt hell-again too, and I’m starting from now by not even posting about the fact that it’s not closed. T-shirt Hell is closed to me. I can’t believe I even felt sorry they were closing down!
You never covered T-Shirt Hell in the first place. Quit pretending that now you’re going to stop covering them. And so what if they pretended to close down. It was a joke and it’s perfectly in keeping with the tone and the humor the site has always displayed.
I’m dying to see if my comment gets approved.
Jan,
Fair enough, I’ve only covered one shirt from t-shirt hell in the past. A bulk of their merchandise was either off-topic or too crude for coverage here. But I certainly won’t bother browsing in the future.
But as someone who personally helped dupe the blogsphere your opinion is not entirely unbiased either. Depending on the state what t-shirt hell did could be construed as false advertising (see point #3). It was more than a joke. And the bridge has pretty much been burned if he should try something like this in the future.
The biggest point tho – would you trust this guy with your credit card number?
“The biggest point tho – would you trust this guy with your credit card number?”
Oh, give me a break. Name a t-shirt company that’s been on the net longer than T-Shirt Hell? Have you ever heard of any issues with orders or fraud or the like? I haven’t. Did you look to see how many complaints they’ve had in their history with the BBB? I looked the other day and it was 1. 1 complaint. Compare that with Busted Tees who have 43 complaints in the last 36 months or Threadless who have 20 and I think you answered your own question.
Just cause the ass pulled a prank to get sales, doesn’t mean he would do something illegal or screw customers over.
And I agree with Jan, it’s not like you bloggers ever covered T-shirt hell to begin with. Do you think they really care if you say you’re not going to cover them in the future?
I fell duped as much as the rest of you, but I don’t think that us tee bloggers would have had that much of an effect to be the cause of a large chunk of those 100,000 tees (which is an accurate figure from what I’ve seen), especially since every (tee) blog post I saw about the closure was pretty negative about the site.
@Michael
No, even before his recent actions it was pretty clear he doesn’t care. This is not about changing him. It’s about a change with me.
@Andy
To each their own. I’m not calling every t-shirt blog and review site ban t-shirt from hell shirt (although the rapid response from some shows there is support for the idea). I can only speak for the content of this site. And going forward even if T-Shirt hell creates the most jaw-droppingly clever geek shirt since the shroud of turin – a design so perfect that affiliate sales could bathe my grandkids in riches and fondle a thousand mistresses with trackbacks I won’t cover it.
I too posted about them but I did say: “Not really sure what to think of it, but it’s a fun read.” I was suspicious, but it was news, regardless. I too feel slightly duped (I say slightly cause I never FULLY believed it).