While you do need to be careful about this bullshit, things do actually often hit lows for black Friday sales. Particularly electronics.
I went clothes shopping in the US today and saved 496 dollars with all the coupons and sales, and got mountains of stuff. I always do it that way, but I shop the day after Black Friday and the deals are still the same. US department stores on holiday long weekends are the best deal ever, I save money all year and go for a great big shop.
For like the first ten of them and you have to get to the store 6 hours before it opens and then fight gladiator matches with all the other crazy people to be at the cash register first. No thanks, man!
That very much still happens. I have not seen any killer deals online. Have you?
But definitely double check SKUs. A lot of Black Friday products are more cheaply made than their usual counterparts, even if they outwardly seem like the same product.
I saw it when I worked retail (which was a long time ago, so I guess as an anecdote, add an extra grain of salt; maybe things have changed but I doubt it).
We would get pallets of product right before Black Friday, and curiously, they would overlap with product we already had in the store. For example, if we carried a 40" TV from brand X (TVs are very notorious for this Black Friday swapping), we’d get a pallet of 40" TVs from brand X which looked exactly the same, had the same specs on the box, but a different SKU. In some cases we were instructed to remove the original stock and replace it with the Black Friday stock, which would be priced lower.
As others have mentioned, returns on the sale stock would be high. And there would be interesting differences, like an obviously cheaper remote or an overall lighter unit.
And of course sometimes there was no overlap – we’d get some product from some no name brand that just sat out in the aisle on its pallet. These were absolutely only brought in for Black Friday and I have to assume they were the cheapest imaginable garbage inside.
I’ve never sought out a Black Friday sale since those days.
TVs are a classic example. I found luggage accidentally one time years ago. Was so poorly made I was shocked it hasn’t disintegrated in transit. Immediately returned it. When I did some research, it looked like none had ever actually sold off that SKU until Black Friday, and they had a stupid price listed months before hand for that deep discount the day of.
I used to work at Best Buy in the Video department. We got all new products shipped in just for Black Friday. One year we got these $40 VCRs (I realize I’m dating myself here) that we must have sold a billion of. Within the week, we had so many returns that we didn’t have any place to put them.
Similarly Best Buy’s brand, Insignia, is a mix mashed TV full of components from other TV brands (unless that has changed in the last 4 years). They’re usually the ones to go on deep discount but, due to the nature of the internals not being from one company, they’re nearly impossible to repair.
So, although your Insignia may last a year and a half or two, the Sharp panel may fail, the Phillips backlight could fail, or the PCB from Samsung could fail, adding to more e-waste.
You gotta track stuff you want to buy ahead of the pre-sale price hikes. Depending on where you live, what you want to buy and how much money you make that might be too much time and energy so checking price history sites (like camelcamelcamel for amazon) when they’re available also works in a pinch.
