fun fact: manufacturers often ship specific black friday models of electronics with cheaper internals
https://cybernews.com/gadgets/black-friday-deals-cheaper-quality-electronics/
And fewer HDMI ports, in the case of TVs.
And how. A friend of mine’s mom bought one of those Black Friday deal TVs which only has one HDMI port, and despite being a 47" width class also turned out to be only a 720p panel when I examined it.
She bought this probably ten years ago or so, and still has it. Surprisingly, it still works. Given that the only article ever plugged into that TV is one cable box anyway, it seems to work for her.
I’ve seen that on a big (and I think expensive) Samsung TV at a friend’s parent’s house. Weirdly enough the TV came with an external HDMI source switcher box. Really weird design choice on Samsung’s part.
I have one of those, I get the feeling they did it mostly so they could show off how thin they can make a TV. Actually makes good sense for another reason IMO: modularity. Power supply and control stuff is separated from the panel, so it’s easy to swap it out if the power supply or something else dies.
TLDR: don’t buy the “limited edition” version and verify the model is the correct one you want because they produce “derivatives”.
Not just in electronics. I worked in fashion retail 10 years back and we’d get a cheaply made “black Friday special” item to be put out that has the branding and form of the popular quality product. Wasn’t even that much cheaper than the actual standard apparel. Sold out every year of course.
Piss, I’m glad I live in a country where that’s illegal.
YSK that this is indeed illegal in many places such as the EU for example.
However those tricky manufacturers have a few tricks to get around this. One of the things they do is to create special “discount” SKUs. Despite their name, these SKUs are often not discounted at all and kept artificially high. Their specs usually aren’t great, so the value for money is poor most of the time. However when something like a holiday sale comes around, these SKUs get discounted massively. That way the shops can still claim the discount is huge and would technically be legal, even though there are plenty of other very similar SKUs in the same series that were available for less.
This isn’t a new thing, so called “retail” SKUs have also been around for a long time. Ever since webshops started out-competing retail stores manufacturers have been creating retail SKUs. These are often very similar or the same as another SKU in the series, but given a unique number and sometimes name. These SKUs are then only sold by distributors to retail outlets. Then when a shopper is in the store and looks up the price of the SKU on the internet, they don’t see a dozen webshops with a lower price, but instead only other retail chains with a very similar price. This is to stop people from going to stores, get advice and look at all the models, only to then buy the selected model online. Of course smarter people can easily figure out which SKU is the corresponding non retail SKU. But if you are smart enough to do that you can probably figure out what model to buy without going to a store.
Still it’s good for the law to exist and it does help a lot. The whole SKU shenanigans are only for some things, such as TVs, notebooks, appliances such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and some other stuff people usually go to stores to buy. For a lot of smaller stuff, such as PC components for example, this usually doesn’t happen.
This custom SKU trick is also used by retailers to advertise “We’ll price match any other store!” when technically the only store who sells that exact SKU is them!
(Of course some retailers are genuine when they offer to price match, it’s not always a scam)
The mattress industry is notorious for being rife with this. And for anyone wondering, the markup on mattresses is also insane. I briefly sold them, and most of our brands forced us to maintain a markup of around 800% via UMRP (i.e., the manufacturer sets the retail price and revokes your dealership license if you sell below that price).
When I was in school a teacher told us that washing powder manufacturers would have a way of getting around “advertising needs to be true and accurate” laws. What they’d do is gradually reduce the strength of their product over time (normally by just cutting it with something cheap). Then they’d revert it back to its original strength so that they could announce “Now TWICE as strong!”
It’s illegal here in Sweden, for example the lowest price within the last 30 days also need to be listed alongside the discount offer. The effect this has is that 31 days before Black Friday, the retailers bump up the price.
Capitalist bastards are going to capitalist no matter what.
Years back when I worked for Kmart, there was some sort of large Samsung Galaxy tablet advertised as a Black Friday front-page exclusive for only $40. As you can imagine, people were ready to kick the fucking doors down to get their hands on those, because anyone dumb enough to participate in the Black Friday madness is definitely too dumb to know why 1gb non-expandable storage is next to fucking worthless. Not to mention they had the weakest hardware imaginable, with a whopping 1.5 MP camera.
Black Friday is such a cheap illusion.
Oi, this lil guy still flies, after some taming.
Stock ROM was almost uselessly laggy though.
that seems like a decent price for a digital photo frame/weather dashboard
anyone dumb enough to participate in the Black Friday madness is definitely too dumb to know why 1gb non-expandable storage is next to fucking worthless
It’s easy to call people “dumb enough” when you’ve flooded their ears with propaganda year after year after year.
More difficult to navigate the minefield of crap that floods retail stores and online sites or to pick out the “honest” review site from the army of influencer sales and marketing shills or to fully grasp why two seemingly identical products would have radically different sticker prices.
The opposite end of the “If it’s too good to be true…” moniker is the Velben Good. Companies are just as happy to sell you a 500x marked-up widget by spending an equivalent in native ads and other subliminal marketing. For every $40 1gb tablet in the clearance aisle there’s a $400 1gb tablet with gold leaf and a Disney celebrity’s face on the box and a dozen YouTubers/Facebookers screaming “Best In Value!” from the top of the website’s Recommended Videos page.
And none of that deals with the volume of products that straight up lie about what’s in the box. In the end, failing to step on a consumerist punji stick is as much the result of good luck as good sense.
Black Friday is such a cheap illusion.
It is the biggest sales day of the year, because its a day enormous numbers of people have off that’s in close proximity to the Christmas season. Because businesses know they’re going to see high sales volume, they have an incentive to maximize units sold at a lower average markup than their competitors.
There’s a real rational marketing logic to discounting goods (and then saturating the airwaves with marketing material) in the weeks leading up to it. But over time, the math has changed from “maximize volume of sales to generate optimal profit” into “maximize volume of advertisements to generate maximal per-unit profit margins”.
Fuck black Friday. I would rather just hibernate after Thanksgiving until the new year, and skip Christmas entirely
Santa doesn’t live in the USA though. Did the Turnip put tariffs on him too?.. 🤔
Santa won’t be allowed into the US because he’s obviously a liberal giving presents to poor children, obviously a terrorist.
I celebrate the winter solstice as the night of family. You and your immediate circle of close family gather to appreciate each other’s company. You’re only allowed to give useful clothing, hand made goods, or items that will meaningfully improve the life of a loved one. Last year I gave my spouse a coat hook with a dinosaur on it for her backpack.
Hmmmmm. Hey guys! It’ll be really easy to steal things from this guys house on black Friday. All you gotta do is be quiet. He’s going to eat himself into a coma on Thanksgiving!!!
I had a screenshot of when I looked at a smartwatch I was considering, and wow, it was 50% off, ofc there is a shop aggregator site in my country that has price history and it has been selling at that 50% price for months before
I wish I’d kept screenshots, because I tried to buy something for £80 a few weeks before black friday. Thought id hold on and maybe itd come in the sales. Suddenly it was
£180£100Camelcamelcamel tracks Amazon prices. I think there’s even a script that displays the price history right on the store page.
That site is owned by Amazon now.Correction: they are affiliated with Amazon.
Do you have a source on that? I can’t find any mention of this from having a quick search just now.
Fixed.
Also, added context plus apparently Keepa is better?
https://entreresource.com/heres-why-amazon-sellers-stopped-using-camelcamelcamel/
Thanks!
Seems like CCC may no longer be the best choice, but it is still a free choice, and the article doesn’t seem to suggest they are falsifying their data.
Good to know.
It never happened, the only think that happened is that Amazon asked to the site owner to stop tracking prices in some regions during covid-19 pandemic
Use a price tracker. There are many for Amazon, eg https://camelcamelcamel.com/
You can always get your own screen scraper software to do it yourself.
CCC often doesn’t register Amazon sales, in my experience.
I use https://keepa.com/
I’m starting to think this is how retail should operate as a rule. Same as how you interact with the stock market. Publicly available price history. If you feel like paying a premium to have it Now rather than Maybe Lower Later, that’s up to you!
Sales are incredibly offputting if you think about them. You’ve been overcharging people this whole time and this is a real price? I doubt they are selling for a loss the vast majority of the time.
The “true meaning”* of Black Friday is clearing out old stock that didn’t sell and getting it off the books before the New Year.
You used to be able to get some decent deals, but now it’s just warmed over crap produced specially to be sold at a discount.
*This is meant in a parallel to the feeling of “the true meaning of Christmas”. Not the literal meaning.
If you’re going to shop, use something like CamelCamelCamel.com to determine a good price.
Alternatively, boycott Black Friday and shop on another day!
I feel like they bought the domain name while drunk, and then had to come up with a website to put on it afterwards.
In Europe, idealo is great. For IT stuff and electronics, Geizhals.
Some of the stores did run valid sales – limited-time price reductions on the selected merchandise. But Brasler said Sears, Kohl’s and Macy’s offered what he called “fake” sale prices.
“It’s shameful what they’re doing,” Brasler told NBC News. “They’re making it appear that this is a special low price, when in fact, it’s always their price. And often, it’s not even a low price, if you took the time to compare.”
- Sears had what Checkbook called “the most egregious always-on-sale practices.” Eight out of nine items tracked, were almost or always on sale. Two were on sale 44 out of 44 weeks.
- Kohl’s had eight of the nine items checked on sale more than half the time during the 44-week survey period. Four were always or almost always offered at sale prices.
- Macy’s had one item almost always on sale and four that were on sale 70 percent or more of the time. Two items Checkbook monitored never went on sale.
Incidentally, Sears effectively slit its own throat during the '10s when it on-boarded a hyper-libertarian CEO who tried to maximize profits within the various internal holdings of the company itself.
The Sears story is a textbook tale of how failures to centrally plan your economy and reliance on market gimmicks to drive traffic can undermine the core business model that drives value creation in a company.
That’s like hard drive prices. Looking at Newegg their hard drives are always “on sale” it just depends on whether the sale is $10.00 or $50.00.
Illegal over here. Must be at the pre discounted rate for at least 31 days before the sale
I look forward to not shopping on black Friday, same as I do every year.
So you look sideways to it.
It’s always right around my birthday, and I go camping that week.
I’d never buy from place that uses these shitty tactics. You can always compare the price via other websites.
In my experience almost al websites use this tactic lol
You can always compare the price via other websites.
Black Friday Brief: ‘Derivative’ TVs a Smoking Deal or a Sham?
“If you see an amazing deal on a set, it could be because it’s been cranked out in a limited run just for Black Friday,” said Benjamin Glaser, features editor at DealNews.com. “They can artificially inflate the price and exaggerate the discount because there’s technically no price history for that product, since it’s brand new.”
These limited edition models are called “derivative” products. Sometimes the manufacturer simply gives an existing product a new model number. In other cases, they make changes to the current model in order to hit a lower price point. For example, a TV could have one less HDMI input or use lower quality parts.
“It’s a strategy devised by manufactures in conjunction with retailers that makes it harder for shoppers to do direct price comparisons because you’re not going to see that exact same model anywhere else,” explained Jim Willcox, senior electronics editor at Consumer Reports. “It also helps retailers as they’ve stepped-up their price-matching guarantees. Almost all of these price-match offers are limited to the exact same model. If you can’t compare that exact same model, they don’t have to match the price.”
When it comes to corporations with a massive market presence, I truly wonder if it’s cheaper in the long run to be honest or to try and fool some of the people all of the time. Because from what I’ve seen in the past few decades, PT Barnum was right.
It’s almost as if eventually, the corporate executive floors become infected with mindless hollow business school suits (not all, but enough to qualify as some sort of mental plague), reading their idiotic self-motivational guide books, and somewhere along the way they got married to the mantra that “business is war”, mediocre and dense enough to think (if even that) that Akio Morita was also referring to the customers.
Kind of similar, in many ways, to how now incels and racists eventually convince each other that the problem cannot be in their unwashed, unexamined selves, the problem MUST be women/minorities.
So maybe we could call them corporate incels. A cartoon version is what we see in American Psycho. A problem with company size is that it will attract the parasites, and they will infect everything they touch.
I’m on my way up the ladder! Watch me treat customers and their communities as the enemy to be subjugated and betrayed and milked, that’s what the guy from Sony said, amirite? I’m on my way to the 1%, so fuck all of you, I have arrived!
And guess what? They end up being rewarded, because enough people fall for this shit, or at least tolerate it and keep on going to their stores.
Nobody cares about the long run. You can fool all of the people until next quarter, pull your golden parachute, and go suck the marrow out of the next corporation like a locust.
Umm, we got one of these dumped off at our city park for like over a month or so. Yes used and starting to rust on top a bit, but still fully usable with just a bit of grill cleanup.
I think it’s been basically honorary community usage since it was dropped off, I’m surprised nobody has stolen or scrapped it yet.
i got one that somebody was giving away for free. It was in rough shape, but still usable. I used it a couple of times before closing it for the winter. When springtime came around and I was ready to grill again, I was surprised to find a nest full of eggs. We watched the babies hatch, grow up, and leave the nest. Now we just keep it as a bird nursery.
Real consuuuuumers know that if you want an actual deal on something you plan to buy, you should wait for a rolling sale.
This has the added bonus of forcing you to think about how much you actually want to buy said thing, and also comes around pretty frequently so you don’t have to wait for any yearly events.
All time low prices are just not worth it in terms of time investment monitoring sales unless the thing is your hobby or you are really hard on cash and the purchase is a necessary one and a stretch for you, but then those purchase usually are not ones you can wait for anyways.
rolling sale
What’s that?
A term for a regular sales price that comes back at normal not specifically event related intervals.
For instance many clothing stores will just have a “sale” every 4 weeks fore the same prices as the sale 4 weeks ago.
Another example is consumer electronics. Look at any price tracker and they’ll usually follow a very loose pattern
Relevant random example of some harddrive
Oh wow that Newegg Canada in Green is crazy. And for a pretty large discount too.
I had not encountered this on any price graphs before, very interesting. Thank you.
Yup. Thats the type of chart I would call a rolling sales chart. Amazon does the same, as does Bestbuy.
Many retailers do frankly.
Waiting a week can often save you 25-30%, and the high price would have been labelled a sale just the same as the low price, so no one would be any wiser to this without tracking the price.
