This is the best summary I could come up with:
Just one in 50 Black Friday deals are at their cheapest price on the day of the sales extravaganza, according to analysis of last yearâs event by a leading consumer group.
analysed 208 deals last year at eight major home and tech retailers including Amazon, Argos, and Currys.
Retail said that customers should not feel âpressured to splash out on Black Friday as itâs rarely the cheapest time to shopâ.
also looked at an extended sales period covering 18 November until 2 December, in order to catch Cyber Monday which follows the Thanksgiving weekend, and still found that 86% of products were the same price or cheaper at other times of the year.
Argos told the Guardian that only one product in its analysis was a Black Friday deal, while the others were part of other promotional offers.
Amazon had the second-highest percentage (69%) of products that were cheaper than their Black Friday price at other times of the year.
The original article contains 542 words, the summary contains 160 words. Saved 70%. Iâm a bot and Iâm open source!
I had no concept of black Friday until the late 90s when I was told about it and looked at my sister like she was crazy for fighting over deals on socks and underwear. It wasnât until a few years later when a girlfriend wanted to get her sibling a laptop and we stood in line at 3am at circuit shitty that I realized it really was all fucking stupid and not worth it.
I used to work at Microcenter for awhile. The best time to buy was always back to school. Holiday deals start at the beginning of November and are the exact same as Black Friday minus a few small door buster deals and maybe a special on a few models of pc. During back to school, pretty much everything is heavily discounted.
Would make sense because laptop companies always push out new products for back to school, and usually cpu releases happen months before back to school to allow production to ramp up to account for the sales.
A lot of the deals on Black Friday are actually cheaper quality products. A TV specially made to be cheaper than the regular model. Less HDMI ports, lower quality parts. And the item/model number is slightly different.
Thatâs why I love deal communities like Slickdeals, if the deal sucks someone will be calling it out
I also like tools like Honey or CamelCamelCamel, which show you the actual price changes over time, and you can decide when the right time to buy is. Obviously, you never know when something will go on sale in the future, but it at least helps you see how good the current price is compared to the past month or year.
This is very noticeable on Amazon especially. So many âdealsâ from budget brands or one-off Chinese brands that nobody has never heard of. This is especially noticeable on Prime Day too.
I have worked with buyers at Best Buy that negotiate these âdealsâ. The manufacturers will create a near identical version of a higher quality product, but the model number will be a sub-model (like -a). When uninformed consumers are bargain shopping for a deal they will see that the âsameâ model is more expensive elsewhere and think they are getting a deal. This sub-model product will have cheaper components and fewer features and a higher product margin.
Some of these products would have very high failure rates but the companies still keep doing this because it helps to push their extended warranties. Then people buy them even when they buy higher quality products because they remember the failure on the other one.
Long story short, donât shop on Black Friday for deals in electronics.
I got bit by this earlier in the year. I needed a smaller TV for the bedroom. I narrowed down the line I wanted. Target and Best Buy were the only two local stores to carry it. BB had the 2023 model, Target had a 2022 model with a sub-designation that was $50 cheaper. I went with Target because I didnât care if it was an older model, just needed something good enough. Well, it wasnât good enough, not even close. The color accuracy was so bad that the tint adjustment was useless â it was both too pink and too green no matter what. I dug out my old calibration disk and tried to adjust the color by isolating red/green/blue channels. The best-effort adjustments made it better, but still awful. I even connected it to the network (hardwire only, fuck âsmartâ appliances) just in case a firmware update helped. It did not, so back it went. Had to wait, multiple times in line and for someone to pull from the back, for like 45 minutes because they âdonât do exchangesâ so I needed to do a song and dance to get the sale price on a replacement purchase. Got the replacement home, same deal. At that point I suspected it was leftover Black Friday junk.
Took it back and went to Best Buy. Spent the extra $50. Perfect color out of the box. Lesson(s) learned.
i ended up with a cheapened âwalmartâ model that was also a âlast yearâs modelâ. was the cheapest, smallest 1080p in the store a couple years back when prices were inflated and selection was weak. but i couldnât take it back, it was a gift.
iâm stuck with only 2 hdmi, no bt or 3.5mm, and rca analog inputs iâll never use⊠but at least i got the better remote than a co-worker that has the next yearâs modelâand iâm still grateful i was able to finally dump the 19 inch tube and the equally-small monitor that were serving as my âTVsâ.
Wouldnât it be noticeable because this new â-aâ model would have no ratings/reviews?
I got a smart TV about 10 years ago on Black Friday. It was fine until a few years the screen âbruisedâ. Everything now has a purple hue and that is the âguestâ tv. No other lcd tv Iâve had has had the same issues.
Thatâs undoubtedly true in general, but there are exceptions. For example:
Itâs a little hard to tell just looking at specifications without directly comparing in person, but I think the Costco Black Friday-specific version of the Roland FP-10 digital piano actually manages to be better than the normal version (even before you consider that itâs cheaper and comes with a bunch of accessories). Specifically, it has 128 voice polyphony instead of the regular 96, and the only other difference I can find is that it advertises âa custom selection of tones curated by Roland and Costco exclusively for the FRP-2-ACR,â which I hope doesnât mean theyâre worse.
What a shocker that Black Friday is all a marketing scam.
Amazon are the worst for it. Instead of reducing the prices of their products, they will often just add the RRP next to the existing price and claim that itâs 35% off or whatever, even though theyâve actually only knocked about ÂŁ5 off the price it was already.
Amazon also secretly ran an algorithm called project Nessie that just straight up creates inflation.
The employee at Amazon who came up with this idea probably got a big fat bonus. To the detriment of everybody else.
It initially started with tech saavy who are in the know how of prices getting a good deal, but the more casual the practice became, so did the sale value as well, as it switched from techies getting a good deal to corpo creating black friday specific products to trick the layperson that theyre getting a good deal.
Sales are only good if the average person doing the shopping is also in the knowhow for pricing.
