Woot Offers TouchPad Buyers $100 And Star Wars Defense

If you're an avid South Park fan like every good god-fearing American in North America and myself are, you remember the episode in which there's a court case that lawyer Johnnie Cochran wins by using the Chewbacca defense, a method in which he speaks about the Star Wars character tied to several factoids about his living situation in order to utterly confuse the jury and ultimately win the case. It appears today that the folks at Woot are pulling a similar hilarious trick, this time using Chewbacca's good friend Lando Calrissian, and in this case offering early adopter purchasers of the HP TouchPad a $99 partial refund for their troubles in order to make them less mad at the fact that they payed full price before the recent fire sale of said tablet.

In this case Woot is sending out emails that include an explanation of how they are in fact just like Lando when he made that awesome plan on Bespin Cloud City in the Empire Strikes Back to work with the Empire to give away Luke Skywalker in exchange for the city's safety. Turned out that didn't work so well, and certainly those businesses (like Woot) left holding stacks of HP TouchPads after the announcement that they'd be reduced to $99 isn't all that unlike the Lando situation.

What Woot is doing now, according to this email, is giving you back $100 of your original purchase price so that you'll be a bit more satisfied with the fact that, like most of America, had you waited until HP announced their ditching of the webOS hardware they'd already made, they'd have gotten a much lower priced deal. Read the full text of the email below:

Seem reasonable to you? Seems pretty reasonable to us.