You could see it coming from a mile away—and it still hurt to watch. On a recent The Price Is Right episode, one contestant made a mistake so painfully obvious, viewers everywhere winced in unison. The tension was classic game show gold: a moment where the prize was within reach, the rules were clear, and the bad decision came anyway. It was the kind of blunder that doesn’t just cost money—it haunts reruns.

Sometimes You Just Have to Trust Yourself on ‘The Price Is Right’

After successfully graduating from Contestant’s Row with a $400 bid on four pairs of Brook designer sunglasses, valued at $660, Lucy made her way on stage to join host Drew Carey and play Time is Money. The game, one of the most recent in the show’s cavalcade of games (originally premiered in 2003 in the Bob Barker era, with a revamped edition launched in 2014 with Carey), gives the player a chance at a cool $20,000. To play, five grocery items are shown, and the contestant has 10 seconds to place the five items on one of three platforms based on their prices: $0 to $2.99, $3.00 to $5.99, and over $6.00. When time runs out, Carey asks if they’re right. If they are, they win $20,000. If they’re not, they have 40 seconds to try again, with that $20,000 dropping in $500 increments every second. If they manage to get the prices right before the clock hits zero, they win whatever’s left over, but if they don’t? Bum-bum-ba-dum-whaaaa.

So time literally is money in Time is Money, so every second has to count. Lucy confessed that, “Speed is not my thing,” so Carey helped her with strategy, telling her to decide where the items should go as announcer George Gray described the items. Lucy did her first pass within 10 seconds, but was incorrect, so it was onto the second stage for a shot at salvaging some cash for her troubles. The 40-second timer went off, and that’s when Lucy made her mistake. Instead of thinking about where the items should go, she turned to the audience to ask where they thought the items should go, prompting Carey to remark, “You’ve lost $5,000 just looking at the audience.” She rang in again, and again she was still wrong, with Carey being decidedly unhelpful by adding that she’d now lost almost $10,000 by looking to the audience for help.

Lucy Could Have Fared Far Worse on ‘The Price Is Right.

Image via CBS Image via CBS Image via CBS Image via CBS Image via CBS

Image via CBS Image via CBS Image via CBS Image via CBS Image via CBS

Luckily for Lucy, the third time was the charm, and she netted $7,172, which Carey added was “not bad at all.” It certainly isn’t all that bad for less than a minute of work, but she could have done far better had she not turned to the audience for help. How are you supposed to process a dozen conflicting shouts under pressure? Do you scan the crowd for one face that looks remotely trustworthy? Even if you manage to pick out the consensus, you’re still relying on an audience that’s likely a little bitter they’re not the ones on stage. Are they really rooting for you—or just eager to see a crash? “Of course that Juicy Fruit gum costs over $6.00, trust me.” Sure. At best, it gives you someone else to blame when things go sideways. Viewers at home? They’ve already decided you blew it.

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The price was right, but the dress almost wasn’t.

Lucy isn’t the first contestant on The Price Is Right to make the mistake of turning to the audience for help. In a March 2025 episode, Yanira, a contestant from Hawaii, was playing Switcheroo when she began second-guessing her choices. Rather than committing to them, or relying on herself to make changes, she — yep, you guessed it — turned to the audience for help. Only her actions ended in disaster, with Yanira breaking one of the number blocks when she turned back to move it. She won two things that day: “diddly” and “squat.” Only she didn’t blame the audience for her misfortune. No, Yanira pinned the blame on host Drew Carey. That, friends, is like watching a full-on train nuclear explosion.