Screw Black Friday | Hacker News Reader

Screw Black Friday

blog.zsa.io

Black Friday is used to dump loss leaders, over runs and special order low function items that look like more expensive products. I have yet to ever buy anything offered on these sales.

Edit: There's plenty of info available regarding my statement. Here's a few links.

1. https://marketrealist.com/consumer/are-black-friday-tvs-lowe...

2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/benzingainsights/2012/11/21/why...

3. https://www.businessinsider.com/black-friday-insider-secrets...

I'm guessing you're under 25. Before you were old enough to have money, Black Friday was goooooooood.

I used to pick up 100-packs of CD-R and DVD-Rs from Circuit City for like $10 on Black Friday. That was like a 60-90% discount.

Yeah before the internet killed it Black Friday had some insane doorbusters that would literally get people killed.

Besides the doorbusters, they had limited stocks of rare items too. It'd be like if Best Buy had a sale two years ago on Nvidia GPUs at 40% off retail. So you had the scalpers in the early days of eBay fighting with the parents who needed Christmas presents, on items you couldn't get anywhere else, from Playstations to Tickle Me Elmos.

On second thought, it's probably best that the internet killed it. People are wild.

Oh, it's much better now, but back as a poor college student with time to plan and execute, it was wonderful chaos.

Yeah Best Buy was the worst for these insane deals. TV's for 60% off. The problem? They only got 10 per store.

Used to be the time of the year to stock up on consumables for MTB riders too. Tyres, brake pads, pedals, grips, and anything that gets consumed/exhaussted during a year. Nowadays if you use any price tracker, you can see it's all a scam.

Maybe on Amazon. But many quality brands also do blanket 25-30% off sales on their own sites, which is pretty much the best deal you’ll see all year.

I don’t even grant the OP claim for Amazon. I scrolled Amazon’s deals and found all sorts of good discounts on good purchases from power banks to blenders.

I think everyone is just getting more spoiled and more likely to commiserate with others online about it.

I just bought a vacuum I'd been eyeing for a few months for 40% off. Clearly it's not all "bad deals". BTW it works great is a lot better than my last roomba knock off. The key item is "use your brain and don't give into base buyer instinct"

> If they can offer great prices all year round, why not do it? And if they can’t, then who’s paying for the great deal I’m getting today?

Working at a huge online retailer, I can tell you that the prevalent customer expectation is precisely „greatly reduced prices on black friday“. Even if we offered these reduced prices year round, the expectation would be to offer it even cheaper on Black Friday.

True but… that’s mainly because retailers took an accounting factoid and made it into a promotional holiday and thus set expectations.

It used to be that stores would put on sales items that were languishing at storage. So it was a win-win situation, stores got plenty of customers looking for normally not wanted items at low prices, and customers got a day where they could get items that they didn't value a lot at lower prices.

But, of course, this situation isn't stable.

> If you need a new phone, buy a new phone. If you need a new laptop, buy a new laptop. If you need a new keyboard, buy a new keyboard.

> Not because it’s on sale. Because you need it.

What about things you don't need?

For instance, I didn't need an outdoor security system with motion triggered recording. But I was curious about what critters visit at night. A few days a year we get snow that stays around for two or three days and I see all kinds of tracks in it that I can't match to the usual suspects.

So I wanted such a system someday, but one that wasn't too expensive but good enough that I would not be frustrated with low quality recording or poorly designed hardware or software.

It went on my "get this when I come across a good deal" list. I saw a good deal on the next Prime Day and got something.

Another example. I've got a classical guitar and an electric guitar. For a while I've wanted a steel-string acoustic guitar but I don't need one. There are some songs and styles I'd like to learn that would be better on one, but I've still got so much left to learn of classical guitar its not like I'll run out of stuff to do if I don't get an acoustic immediately.

I made a list of a handful of acoustic guitars to keep an eye on. On Black Friday I checked the site of the manufacturer of one of them. They were having a Black Friday sale that actually made their next tier of guitars up from what I'd been looking at less expensive than the one I'd had my eye on normally goes for.

Yes, humans in a sufficiently developed economy (most are nowadays) act driven by CONVENIENCE not need.

My compromise for this is wait 2 weeks for "do I really need it" (obviously always keeping in mind my overall budget for "extra") . If I shrug at the end of two weeks then I skip it. Most of the time it completely gets flushed from my cache. Other times I can't stop thinking about it, and thus I buy it.

I done an Ask HN[0] yesterday about this entitled `Have we reached peak Black Friday?`. Some of the comments are insightful. This is my question:

> In the start it was novel. New smart TV marked down considerably that sold out in minutes. What a great idea! But then it caught on and became just another grift. Amazon is full of 'tat' that although it's marked down substantially, it's never something I actually need. It's more a good deal for the seller, not the buyer, and has also devolved into scam territory too. If you do enough price watching, you suddenly see new items on the market marked down, but nobody knows the original price, since it's a new item just launched for Black Friday! The whole thing just seems like a grift.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745233

The author might be interested to know about Buy Nothing Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_Nothing_Day

Why not treat it as another kind of sale? Namely, you know you are going to need X soon, you are not in a hurry to buy it, so you can wait until a sale/black Friday/January sale comes in.

Black Friday for me is about the tradeoff between money and patience.

Customers who do not have patience but have money can pay the normal marked up prices.

Customers who have patience but do not have money can wait for Black Friday.

Sure, you can have mid pricing all year round but that prices out a portion of your customer base.

That's assuming black Friday has the best deals, which by my experience does not, so if you are patient you should really set up price alert and buy when it triggers instead thinking you will get the best deal on black Friday.

I still see some good deals. It's obviously not the same as it used to be but I'm still satisfied with this year.

I do feel like there were many more "fake discounts" this year where many brands simply rehashed the same discounts they were continuously offering before. I don't mind real discounts, but find it extremely distasteful when fake discounts are offered.

Two other negative externalities byproducts of Black Friday

* "you are the product" cranked up to 11, so reductive and fundamentally misanthropic

* Creates a lot of confusion and axiety in an already mentally fragile world

I would think the current economy has already screwed Black Friday.

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