General

Did anyone else find it weird that many stores didn't even have a traditional ad for Black Friday? I felt like that was a big reason why people didn't go out. I used to look forward to the Walmart ad, and this year's was just weird -- it was more like a "deals all month" type of ad with few to no doorbusters for Black Friday. There just wasn't anything to get me out of bed and shopping at 5AM like there used to be.

Also, I don't know if the TikTok videos are real, but people were sliding out the price tags on the items and it showed the everyday price the same as the Black Friday price. That's really the nail in the coffin.

Master_Z wrote:
Been like that several years in a row. Check price trackers websites for more information. It has always been marketing hype.

The past two years now I've made a pilgrimage to head out to the Castleton shopping centers to check the traffic (on foot). Best Buy had a mild uptick this year versus last but the mall is still pretty much just half full by 8-9am, mostly workers and rideshares waiting for fares. The streets are actually super dead compared to a normal Friday, it's eerie. It's nature healing honestly, the old ways were not good, but yeah the prices are basically "You've Seen This Sale Four Times Already This Year", stuff that used to be marked down to $15-20 are now firmly at $30. About the only real deals to be had are like, 4K televisions if you haven't upgraded by 2023, in 2019 I paid $530 for a television that's essentially now on sale for around ...$250 max. There's close calls at $150 for similar stuff. So now the big get is OLED. Give it another five years and it'll probably be standard.

But yeah, even five years ago Black Friday was bangin' on 82nd/86th, end to end. Now, almost nobody.

Master_Z wrote:

Amazon and online places are guilty of that too.

A couple weeks before black Friday they have the price at, say $250, then jack it up to $350 so they can put an amazing deal of $100 off for black Friday and hope no one notices.

There are plenty of apps and sites that track prices so you can confirm if a deal is really a deal or if it's ✌ deal ✌.

Best thing to do is have the things you want on a list and when they reach a price you like, you buy it. Works all year round too, not just black Friday

Walmart does that all the time, saying they are rolling back prices only to find it's the normal price. I've even seen it on clearance stickers. "Was 4.97, Now 4.97"

Added nsfw tags for language. I still use the swear filter ya know

benstylus wrote:

Oops, sorry. Slipped my mind.