Did you bag a goodie in the Black Friday Deals? This is just a little look at what we found and thought of the supposed ‘Biggest Sale Day of the Year’.
It’s a thing that didn’t even exist (in the UK) until about 10 years ago, we would see TV reports of hoards of overweight, over stuffed, American’s standing at the gates of Shopping Malls in their 1,000’s, the morning after Thanksgiving. All waiting for it to rise and then charging to JC Penny’s, Walmart and the others to get the greatest bargain of the year. With the Internet and Amazon taking a large portion of everyone’s sales these days, the Sale Day has become an even bigger business and Worldwide. So, now we wait and hold off on buying new stuff, for months even, ‘Hold on until Black Friday’ is a common suggestion, in the hopes that a new phone or Washing Machine will be half price.
So, that’s what we did this year, as we have for the last few, for us it’s kind of Day 1 of Christmas Present Buying. This year we (family and friends included) held out on buying a much needed Phone and iPad, as well as other stuff, to get the best deal.
There are those influencers that seem to know ahead of time what every store and company are giving away for Black Friday, but we are just like you and had some idea of what we could get, mostly based on previous years, such as Apple gave away Air-Pods one year. Korean Beauty brand Wishtrend gave up to 80% on their range, until they were taken over by an American company and now it’s 20% on the items they are discontinuing. Even Waterstones Bookshop used to do 3 for 1 on books, now you’ll be lucky to get 10% off.
Amazon started early as usual, a week ahead of the day, the website turned orange and black and the prices on many things dropped. But the promise of massive deals wasn’t fulfilled, there were a lot of reductions, but nowhere near as many as previous years and with the attempt to compete with Temu, the new Amazon Haul is selling tons of random ‘Crap’ – Pens and socks, T-Shirts and Christmas Decorations, Batteries and smaller electronics – and the Black Friday Deals were more of this cheap stuff being even cheaper. But in all their Special Day Deals were no better than the Daily Deals.
Many of the physical High Street Stores, noticeably raised prices at the start of November then dropped them again for the day, making it seem like you were getting a bargain, when all you got was the standard price – a sneaky trick, but we are sure it worked on the masses as it always does.
As we said we were holding out on Apple for new big electronics, phone, laptop, iPad, etc (family and friends – not just us!) The deal that transpired turned out to be a Gift Card, but only a certain amount, on certain items and in certain circumstances. Phones are never included in deals apparently, they make a billion dollars a day, so why would they give away anything on such a money maker! Laptops got you a £140 voucher and iPads £60, but the price of the actual device remained the same, the only way that was a bargain was if you then bought more new devices. So buy a Laptop, then buy an iPad with the gift card and then get a 2nd voucher for a later purchase. Yeah, it’s not ‘The Season to be Giving’, at Apple is it? More ‘The season for getting more money out of you than you wanted to spend in the first place’. In the end Amazon had a better deal on the iPad Mini, but neither company were giving anything on iPad Pros or Airs and there were definitely no free Air-Pods! Review on the Apple products coming soon…
Bob did bag a couple of bargains but not that we can talk about before Christmas! (You never know who is reading this).
All-in-All it didn’t end up being a Fabulous Friday of great deals, more a weekend of contemplation and calculations, trying to gauge the best price, who would give you 5% extra here, or there and we still ended up giving Trillionaires even more of owe money than we wanted to. So all in all Black friday was a bit of a let down this year, hopefully it will be better next year.
Now is the build up to Christmas we will be back with some round ups of the year – Top 100’s, Top songs, Coffee Shops etc. So stay tuned…
Climbing Moss 