Catch Of The Day theories

Ok, having used catch of the day loads of times I am starting to think it's actually a bit of a big scam.

For one, rather than handling large volumes of traffic, COTD chooses to frustrate the **** out of a potential customer base by leaving them with their browser sessions/connections constantly timing out. So not only does the customer have no idea whether they are or will be having any level of success, the customer sees a nice "Service Unavailable" page or similar.

To me that seems like a real gimmick, given the fact that the level of traffic required to bring such a self-proclaimed large site to its knees is enormous, I have the following two theories:

1.) Catch of the day limits the number of connections it will serve on a particular item, or during the hot product times.

2.) COTD has very few items at the insane prices, because they are actually being sold at a stupid loss to get you on the site. Yes this much is very obvious to most people, as the ad revenue and brand exposure they are delivering to the brands they sell in itself would be gold.

It would be very easy for COTD to scale their website to handle elegantly the number of connections they receive. They could easily make it a first come first served scenario, where it does come down to timing and not so much pure luck of the draw.

They could definitely enhance the system design wise to lessen the frustration of waiting on stalled connections, but I guess its an easy way to not code for the situation.

Most people I talk to in reference to COTD say don't even bother its not worth the hassle, and the chance you'll score something is far too slim.

It would at least be far less frustrating to be redirected to another server or page that informs you the stock is gone rather than the timeout situation.

I think we can see straight through COTD's strategy. I could be wrong or I could be stating the obvious but I think COTD alienates more potential customers than it pleases.