Remember the good old days of looking for the "must-have" toys for the kids?
If you could time it right, you could get to the store as soon as a new shipment of the toy was put onto shelves. Item found, problem solved, and it was a lucky break you could tell other parents about.
But now we're really competing with bots, which are buying the hottest toys from online sites around the globe and reselling them at a premium.
For many families, these are indeed the bots that stole Christmas.
"While the demand for the hottest toys is particularly high this time of year, shoppers are competing against a growing army of bots. For years, scalpers have taken advantage of software robots to scoop up event tickets, but now scammers are employing the same tactics to cheat Christmas shoppers," MSNBC economics correspondent Ali Velshi told NPR.
"The problem is these bots find out things are popular before people do themselves," he says. "So by the time you've decided this is all the rage because you've heard about it from your kid's friends or from someone else, it's hard to" buy it, Velshi says.
Consumer Reports has a write-up on this, as well, explaining how the bots get pasts protections that try to make sure its a human purchasing things online:
"According to New York’s attorney general, some bot operators use 10,000 IP addresses and 500 credit card numbers to bypass retailer purchase limits. In some cases, their software is also trained to read and respond to the bot-fighting CAPTCHA phrases on the checkout page. In other instances, foreign workers are hired on the cheap to type the required info into the security box."
Congress recently passed the "BOTS" bill in 2016, which stands for the Better Online Ticket Sales Act. This applies to bots buying show and concert tickets which, has been a problem for years.
Is it time to expand that Act to more of the shopping sphere so it's harder for bots to steal Christmas (and Hanukkah) 2018?
Or do we just buy this year's hot toy at a markup from bot operators who are re-selling it—and move on?