Woe betide the Black Friday bargain hunter; where once there were stellar deals on giant televisions and hard disk drives now there are slight discounts on underwear and handbags. Sears' ad for this year has been unearthed and, while it naturally has an eclectic selection of goodies on sale ranging from power tools to KitchenAid mixers (and that's just on the front page), from a gadgety perspective we're not finding anything quite worth lining up at 3:00am in November for. There's a 40-inch Samsung 1080p LCD for $599, about $50 cheaper than we can find it for online, and a similar Sony model for $664 -- a whole $10 less than Amazon is asking for a comparable model with free shipping and no uncomfortable small talk with other half-frozen shopaholics. A raft of cheap but mediocre games and movies will be available, some
soon to be obsolete GPS devices, and lots of other random things stuffed into the PDF scan linked below. Not into the whole hunting for deals thing? The other link has everything listed out, making for easy text searching -- and for guilt-free snoozing the day after Turkey Day.
posted Oct 30th 2009 8:36AM
I have been very unimpressed the last few year for Black Friday Sales.
I'd agree, I always thought it was stupid to go out early for shopping, then a few years ago I joined the 'stupid' crowd, because there were just a lot of good deals. Now its not really worth it, as other posters said you can go online and get the product for the same price, why stand in line for it? You know its the coldest day of the year, seems like it always is (in Chicagoland anyway).
Friend of mine who is a GM for a big box chain said Black Friday's have been getting less and less exciting because manufacturers and retailers are already slashing their once wide profit margins on big ticket items. They are still making a profit of course, just not an Apple-esque profit. Anyway, a few years ago it was ok to lower the prices below the profit threshold and sell a few hot button items like TV's at a loss, as they'd easily recoup that from all the additional spending shoppers would do on regularly priced items. But thanks to the internet, we now are mostly smarter consumers, and are only interested in the super cheap items, of which there is a very limited selection already, and know we can get the other things we used to buy in-store cheaper online. Since the only thing people are buying are those big items that are actually costing the stores money to sell, Black Friday quickly lost it's charm to the bottom line-minded managers, and so the days of Big Deals are pretty much gone and buried.
At this point, the only reason to camp out overnight (3am? Who are you guys kidding? If you want to actually have a shot at the big items, the line starts forming around 6pm the day before. Amateurs.) is for items that are hard to find, like the Wii was a few years ago. Like you pointed out already, you can get almost every single TV advertised in this pdf for the same if not very close price online with Amazon or Newegg. Personally, I can't think of any must-have item this year that's worth freezing my ass off for, but it's not even November yet so it could happen.
Black Friday has sucked for a few years now. Its only good if you wanted to buy a high ticket item but are impartial to brand name. For people who want that 32" or 42" TV but don't ccare what brand, typically you can save a few hundred bucks nowadays.
In 2006, I bought two APEX 32" Televisions from Circuit City (R.I.P) for just $200 each. THAT WAS AWESOME.
I've more recently just bought DVD's or XBOX 360 platinum hits, but the problem is, lines at BEST BUY are MURDER - with over 1500 last year before you get to the register. That's insane.
This year, I think the sellout items will be PS3, PSP GO and COD4 MW2.
Better get em early if you can.
The only one with good deals last year was Circuit City!
Oh, wait...
For those of us not in the US WTF is Black friday? I gather it's some kind of sale, but why?
It's a term for the Friday after the US holiday of Thanksgiving (the 3rd Thursday in November). The Christmas shopping season officially begins on that date, and it's called "black friday" because traditionally it was the day when retailers finally "hit the black" (saw profits) for the year.
More information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_%28shopping%29
Think of it as an American celebration of consumerism. The great capitalistic society celebrating capitalism by going to giant super-stores early in the morning and fighting to get inside the store all for a little deal. Only in America.
@Leo
yep, its like an American Holiday dedicated to the start of the Christmas shopping season, and we celebrate by raiding retailers and blowing money on sale items that we would otherwise probably never buy
In a total coincidence, black friday happens to fall on exactly the same night as buy nothing day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_Nothing_Day
Actually it's the day YouTube is filled with videos of trash stampeding into stores ect., after standing in line for hours in the dark, for bullshit electronics that have been marked down 25%.
Usually someone either gets injured or killed. We Laugh a little, and move on with our lives.
@sanskrit
I wish they would move it to the 3rd thursday in november... gorging on dressing and apple pie can't come soon enough if you ask me.
You guys keep calling it a US "holiday." It is not a holiday. It's merely a recognized phenomenon that retailers capitalize on. The government only recognizes Thanksgiving Day (Thursday).
The retailers know that many employers give their employees 2 days off so people can travel and spend time with family, but it also makes it easier to go shopping the next day.
Brick stores need to hop on Amazon, find said product, price it 50% cheaper than that. Now that would light a fire under some people!
Yeah, their accountants and shareholders
Merry Christmas, everyone!
I am very disappointed in the Engadget staff for their short sighted view of thinking that any phone based GPS navigation unit is going to replace and kill off the dedicated navigation unit market. Having used Verizon navigator for over a year now I can say for a fact that I for one would NEVER give up my dedicated unit for a phone based GPS unit.
I know a lot of people that do not want and will never purchase a smartphone. A lot of people buy cell phones to be just that, a mobile phone. It's for emergencies and important calls, not for emailing, sending a hundred texts a day, not for snapping pictures and sending them to everyone you know, just a mobile phone. I am the only one in my family that has a smartphone. The wife has a Alias II because she wants a very compact flip phone, she looked at all the smartphones and think they are way too big for a cell phone. My son doesn't like the smartphones either, we gave him his choice of any Verizon phone and he picked the little Samsung music player phone that rotates open. He wasn't interested in anything but music and a phone.
Every article yesterday that talked about Google, Droid or GPS units talked like the Navigation business should just give up now and close the doors because ooh...Google is in the market now. Refresh my memory, what market that Google has jumped into have they ever dominated to the point to put everyone out of business? Yeah, thats right....exactly none. Not even in the search business have they driven everyone else out completely.
Then you get the dribble about 39% of sales on cell phones in the US this year were smartphones. Anyone have the numbers that break out what the percentage of all the cellular phones under contract in the US right now is? I would be willing to bet that the 39% this year brought the total smartphone percentage to 10 - 15% overall at most. I would be willing to be that there are as many or more pre-paid phones in use right now as there are smartphones. And this is what is going to kill the dedicated navigation industry. Spare me.
@Denis
Do you work for Garmin or TomTom? Either way, you better start looking for a new job soon.
are you always this bitter over free products?
@George,
I was thinking the same thing.
@dennisheadley,
Google almost put Yahoo out of business in about 10 years. Yahoo CEO resigned and they were bagging MS to buy them. And you know what, Yahoo didn't charge for their search just like Google. For GPS, Google's free and better GPS solution vs. inferior GPS units that cost $100+. It will be alot shorter than 10 years.
You're 100 % right. Most of the people here live in a dream world.
The fact that this guy used Verizon Navigator for over a year tells us something....
I neither work for a GPS company, own stock in one or do anything other than use one extensively daily. Nor am I bitter about free applications. I just look at things realistically, and it is far from realistic to think that everyone is going to drop dedicated units to get smartphones with contracts and data plans just to get a free application. I also am someone that knows from experience that Google Maps is far from being as accurate as most dedicated units are. Free does not equal better, despite how many people say otherwise.
I work for a Industrial Automation and Instrumentation company in Field Service Support. I travel around a five state region in the Great Lakes area visiting customer sites. The office schedules appointments so that on any one day I may hit anywhere from one to four customers depending on how spread out the locations are and what problem they need assistance with. Our company sends us work packets with all documentation in a PDF file with completable forms etc, that we might need to document our visit. The office girls used to include a print out of the directions from Google Maps but we found they were so completely unreliable that the company forbid them from doing it anymore and purchased all small dedicated units. With 80 field service people on the road everyday, we went from people always complaining about being unable to follow the directions, being taken to the wrong location or otherwise being late or missing appointments, to never being late or missing any appointments due to navigation issues.
We also do a great number of capital improvement projects at different sites and I can't count the number of times that we at an early project meeting we have decided to pull up an Google view of a site to use for initial brainstorming until we could get some aerial photographs taken, only to find that the whole site that started construction five years ago and went online three years ago is still mostly bulldozed dirt piles in the photos.
Also Google Maps doesn't show many roads, especially roads in industrial parks or that pass through industrial sites even though they show up on dedicated units. unless they have improved their mapping and direction abilities many times over from what they have managed with their constantly updated Maps website is for this application it is going to be lower quality that the dedicated mapping companies can produce.
What I am upset about is for the next month any story that remotely deals with GPS or Cellular phones is going to have some retarded comment added to it about how everyone should ditch their stock and go out of business now if they are in the GPS industry.
I said that I have used Verizon Navigator for over a year and it will never replace my dedicated unit. I have tested it against my dedicated units many times just to see what it would do and just like Engadget reported in their Tom Tom kit article with the extra GPS capabilities of the mounting bracket. My smartphone lags and is less accurate of my position than my dedicated units are. If i relied on it for all my GPS needs I would probably throw it out the window after the fifth or sixth time i passed a turnoff at speed and had to turn around. I have two dedicated units actually, the small screen size unit that the company gave me and my personal 4.3" model that I bought for the better display, traffic updates and Bluetooth integration. Both of those units are many times superior to my smartphone application. Especially since I spend so much time driving around a five state area through rural areas where I loose my Verizon signal quite often.
Most people here live in a future world of everyone having quad core CPU's and high end rigs with smartphones with unlimited data. We all live in houses with HD projectors and OLED displays. We do not use text books cuz everything is delivered online or through ereaders. This is the future of about 10 years from now when my cell phone will be as powerful as the desktop i play games on. So when you come to sites like this i think its a bit absurd that you think the average person will always have a dumb phone or a feature phone. Those people that don't want to use there phone as a camera or a internet browser are not good with tech and probably already have a camera. In 10 years from now the most basic cell phones will have camera's in them that compete with some of the top point and shoots of today.
10 years ago my aunts and grandparents would not switch to a cell phone because there were pay phones everywhere. In 10 years from now no one is going to want a separate GPS, PMP, Camera, Cell phone, netboot, and aircard if they can have one device that does all of those things.
Its ignorant to think that what we have being developed now and things that are just becoming usable, like android, will not be main stream in a few years. My father had one of the original Samsung computers years before they became mainstream and guess what? it wasnt as functional as the old way of doing things but tech evolves.
Why do you think moto is where it is today? they had a huge boom when my generation all started getting cell phones. the razr came into the market and took off with kids and teens that never had one. and a few years later, when they were all ready to move on, Apple hit with the iPhone and millions upgraded from a phone that just called and took pictures and sent texts to something that had been around but not made easy to use. Apple did not invent the smartphone but they sure as hell made it easy to use. Google is not inventing the GPS but when they put it into millions of phones for free, they are getting it out to the public and making it easy to use.
I absolutely agree with you on that one, 10 years from now things will be different and maybe everyone will use one device for everything. What I am saying is that day is not today and this application is not completely ready for prime time. It is way too early to start saying in every single article that the dedicated device makers are out of business already so why are they releasing new products.
Engadget just posted a review of the Droid and the navigation application and guess what, on the first try it gave them directions they couldn't follow down a one way street and then got them stuck in a loop of those same bad directions. That is all I am trying to say. This Google Navigation 1.0, maybe by 2.0 or 3.0 it will be up to the level of the dedicated units in directions and accuracy on things like street directions etc. Having a map of an area does not make you a mapping company, There is a lot of information that goes with it beyond street names and connecting lines from one point to another.
The day will come like you said when all this will come together. But by that day maybe the GPS makers will be in the cellular market like one is getting ready to do and they will be the ones that put that all-in-one device in your hands.
decent prices for tools
You I like. Who needs gadgets when we can get high-quality tools for a good price? Electronics have been racing to the bottom of the pricing barrel for years now. There is no more profit margin to slice off. But some cheap craftsman tools? Hell yeah. Oh, and they have a lifetime warranty. If Sony ever offers me a lifetime warranty on my LCD TV, I'll eat my hand.
Of course now, I'll be singing Tryptophan by Mono Puff all day:
Tryptophan
I was wrong, it's an ordinary day
Tryptophan
It began, I was feeling like I am
By the leg of the bird
And the special day observed
I was mad 'til I found
There was more to go around
Tryptophan
All alone, I was wrong
And there's much more going on
In my vein, in my mind
In my chemistry I'd find
Tryptophane, I'm aware
Like the calm breeze in the air
Like a swan on the lake
I'm not calm, that's my mistake
Tryptophan
you called?
Sweet, there is a DVD / VCR Combo from Magnavox for ONLY $49! That's only $40 too much!
Black Friday was horrible last year and those greedy companies will have it worse this year.
My fav is when walmart claims they have a nice laptop for like $100.00. To get people to flood the store, when in fact each store only gets 1 or 2 to sell at that price.
I also remember when the Wii came out, they put up flyers " the wii is here" So I went in and asked, of course they didn't have it. I asked how many they got in stock originally, the answer was 10.
So its really false advertisement, and all the companies try to make supply look low.
This year, they can all kiss my ass, I'm not playing the game, I'm not buying anything this year at all
Just ecause the deals on technology items aren't that great doesn't mean the sale is worthless. (Yes, I realize this is a technology site so flame away.)
$19.99 for a king-sized down comforter? Count me in. I've been wanting to replace mine anyway. Black friday is one of the best times to save money on clothes as well. And for new homeowners, the discounts on many household items are unmatched any other time of the year.
When I was younger, I only cared about the technology items (TVs, video games, movies, computer stuff). But nowadays I find myself getting excited when Belk has a clearance (50-70% off) and I can use a coupon to save an additional 20%. Saving $500+ on stuff I need is much better than blowing $200 on stuff I don't just because it's cheap.
But... that's just my opinion.
Yes, saving $500 on mundane stuff lets you spend $500 more on electronics later.
Sears is doomed. They will follow the way of the Circuit City warrior.
If you're upset about the doorbusters, you should try calling the stores in advance. In most cases they know exactly how many they'll have 2 or 3 days in advance. Show up early. Ask the people ahead of you what they intend to buy.
Knowing the quantity can be a great advantage. On the Wii release date, I sold my place in line and still managed to buy 3.
You sold your place in line?! That's got to be capitalism at it's purest. Well done.
Somebody should actually read the ads from Sears. They are spreading the joy this year and featuring "Black Friday" specials every Friday from Oct. 30 through the traditional day after Thanksgiving Black Friday. I suspect they will be ramping up their promotions through the month but I saw a few decent appliance deals in the first ads (nothing to write home about but we could use a new microwave) which tend not to get anybody at Engadget too excited. Deals are deals.
So pay attention and look for the ads every Friday through November.
Their Black Friday pricing is no different than regular sales found throughout the year.
If this is any indication of how others will price, it will be safe to say Black Friday will be followed by Red Saturday.
The US has an even semi-'official' start to the Christmas shopping period? Over here some towns don't take down their decorations, some shops sell Christmas stuff all year long, and we started the TV advertising weeks ago!
well, it's kinda the same here, but black friday is just when they start having full-blown xmas sales
This ad was leaked days ago - why so late?
You can get all the ads here:
http://blackfriday.gottadeal.com
http://blackfriday.org
http://theblackfriday.org
What does 3 per store mean..A) I can buy 3 per store..or B) there will only be 3 tvs per store?
I was going to say thats been on blackfriday.info since the 27th and Office Max's ad has been there for over a week. Just a little slow on the uptake Engadget
Cyber Monday > Black Friday.
Better sales and I don't have to get my lazy ass out of bed.
They should call it Black-Eye Day... thats about how it works out not only from a douchebag rabid customer standpoint.. but the screwing over you get when your rebates don't get honored... looking at you liteon...
I had to disappoint anyone but the best deals on electronics aren't going to take place at Black Friday. If you're looking for a digital camera, GPS, digital frame, or netbook --- wait until Cyber Monday.
For those of you looking for an HDTV or home theater are better off waiting until around the Superbowl. Last year, the discounts were deeper than the holidays and you didn't have to worry about any lines. With CES 2010 right around the corner the best deals are still yet to come. 1080p HDTVs have been around for a while so you know that they're going to have to get cheaper since they are going to start pushing 3D, and internet connectivity.
In fact, you can buy a 40" LCD 1080p HDTV for $499 from Best Buy. It's a Dynex, but if you don't want to buy a low end Sharp or Samsung it's not a bad deal.
Chance Stevens,
Editor, http://www.tvlampsnbulbs.com
I don't believe this is for the actual Black Friday in November.
Sears is doing "Black Friday" - like specials early this year to get a jump on the holiday season as they know it will be bad with the economy.
They are planning on having those sales...oddly enough...on Saturday mornings instead of Friday.
Look around...it is on the internet in the past few days' news.
Time to buy new pants
I'm all about going out on Black Friday and scoring a Toshiba HD-A2 for $99.
I always sleep so well on the Friday after Thanksgiving. After making the mistake once I refuse to waste my family's and my time on these Black Friday "deals."
Anyone know what % verizon takes off of phones,even relatively new ones(Samsung Rogue,to be exact),on black friday?
"More information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_%28shopping%29"
good information.