fun fact: manufacturers often ship specific black friday models of electronics with cheaper internals

https://cybernews.com/gadgets/black-friday-deals-cheaper-quality-electronics/

Piss, I'm glad I live in a country where that's illegal.

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

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!

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.

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.

Researchers tracked the prices of six to 10 big ticket items at seven national chains – Best Buy, Costco, Home Depot, Kohl’s, Macy’s, Sears and Target for 44 weeks starting in June 2014.

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.

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.

Illegal over here. Must be at the pre discounted rate for at least 31 days before the sale

I'd never buy from place that uses these shitty tactics. You can always compare the price via other websites.

I look forward to not shopping on black Friday, same as I do every year.

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.

I swear i can check the price history in TaoBao last time i use it, now i can't seems to find any. It's one of the function i find very progressive because seller can't do shit like that and get away with it.

Another shit move is set the price higher and discount it for 30/40% every single day, it makes their price hard to track.

900 for a BBQ? I will stick with firepit cooking.

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.