Had The New Price Is Right (1994) used one-bids where four contestants came on down, would you have supported the Final Jeopardy!-style bidding, where each contestant had ten seconds to bid, with the closest/quickest without going over wins and gets to play a pricing game? In addition, what about a Showcase where all three contestants also write their bids for one Showcase only (no bidding/passing, just the closest without going over wins, and a triple overbid meaning that nobody wins the Showcase)?
Sure, there are plenty of "fairer" ways to do Contestant's Row than down-the-line-one-person-one-bid, but there's a reason it's endured for 66 years.
One Bids are simple, quick, fun to watch, easy to understand, and invite the home viewer to have a quick reaction like "it's way more than that" or "one-up that guy" or "what a dumb bid" or "bid a dollar, these guys are crazy". They set the tone for the pricing games without upstaging them.
If you replace it with ten seconds of think music and secret bids, you lose that immediate viewer reaction. Secret bids might be more fair, but open bids make a better
show.
I’ve seen this mentioned in the FAQ here, but after watching all of those episodes on YouTube, I never saw the contestants line up where the top winner bid / spun last or even first. Every episode I saw, the contestants lined up in the order in which they were called up on-stage.
But yes, I agree the 3 person TPWR showdown didn’t offer much strategy. Maybe it gave contestant #3 the best opportunity to win a car? Out of all the episodes on YouTube, a car game was never played 3rd, whereas the Showcase most often contained one.
I've not watched a ton of TNPIR, but after reading I checked out the first five random episodes that popped up on YouTube with TPWR; sure enough, the purple contestant won four out of five times.
My fix: scrap TPWR, have all three contestants bidding on the showcases, but Cullen-style where contestants have multiple chances to either raise their bid or freeze. Require the winning bid to be within a $3,000-$5,000 range if you don't want to give away a $35,000 showcase every night.