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[–] 92 points 1 year ago* (6 children)

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

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

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  • [–] 49 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    And fewer HDMI ports, in the case of TVs.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    And how. A friend of mine's mom bought one of those Black Friday deal TVs which only has one HDMI port, and despite being a 47" width class also turned out to be only a 720p panel when I examined it.

    She bought this probably ten years ago or so, and still has it. Surprisingly, it still works. Given that the only article ever plugged into that TV is one cable box anyway, it seems to work for her.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I've seen that on a big (and I think expensive) Samsung TV at a friend's parent's house. Weirdly enough the TV came with an external HDMI source switcher box. Really weird design choice on Samsung's part.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    I have one of those, I get the feeling they did it mostly so they could show off how thin they can make a TV. Actually makes good sense for another reason IMO: modularity. Power supply and control stuff is separated from the panel, so it's easy to swap it out if the power supply or something else dies.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Not just in electronics. I worked in fashion retail 10 years back and we'd get a cheaply made "black Friday special" item to be put out that has the branding and form of the popular quality product. Wasn't even that much cheaper than the actual standard apparel. Sold out every year of course.

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  • [–] 55 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Fuck black Friday. I would rather just hibernate after Thanksgiving until the new year, and skip Christmas entirely

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    I celebrate the winter solstice as the night of family. You and your immediate circle of close family gather to appreciate each other's company. You're only allowed to give useful clothing, hand made goods, or items that will meaningfully improve the life of a loved one. Last year I gave my spouse a coat hook with a dinosaur on it for her backpack.

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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!

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  • [–] 50 points 1 year ago (1 child)

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

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago*

    It's illegal here in Sweden, for example the lowest price within the last 30 days also need to be listed alongside the discount offer. The effect this has is that 31 days before Black Friday, the retailers bump up the price.

    Capitalist bastards are going to capitalist no matter what.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    CCC often doesn't register Amazon sales, in my experience.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    I use https://keepa.com/

    I’m starting to think this is how retail should operate as a rule. Same as how you interact with the stock market. Publicly available price history. If you feel like paying a premium to have it Now rather than Maybe Lower Later, that’s up to you!

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Sales are incredibly offputting if you think about them. You've been overcharging people this whole time and this is a real price? I doubt they are selling for a loss the vast majority of the time.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    The "true meaning"* of Black Friday is clearing out old stock that didn't sell and getting it off the books before the New Year.

    You used to be able to get some decent deals, but now it's just warmed over crap produced specially to be sold at a discount.

    *This is meant in a parallel to the feeling of "the true meaning of Christmas". Not the literal meaning.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    i got one that somebody was giving away for free. It was in rough shape, but still usable. I used it a couple of times before closing it for the winter. When springtime came around and I was ready to grill again, I was surprised to find a nest full of eggs. We watched the babies hatch, grow up, and leave the nest. Now we just keep it as a bird nursery.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

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

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (1 child)

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

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  • [+] 7 points 1 year ago* (1 child)
  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

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

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago
    [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

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

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    A term for a regular sales price that comes back at normal not specifically event related intervals.

    For instance many clothing stores will just have a "sale" every 4 weeks fore the same prices as the sale 4 weeks ago.

    Another example is consumer electronics. Look at any price tracker and they'll usually follow a very loose pattern

    Relevant random example of some harddrive

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Oh wow that Newegg Canada in Green is crazy. And for a pretty large discount too.

    I had not encountered this on any price graphs before, very interesting. Thank you.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Yup. Thats the type of chart I would call a rolling sales chart. Amazon does the same, as does Bestbuy.

    Many retailers do frankly.

    Waiting a week can often save you 25-30%, and the high price would have been labelled a sale just the same as the low price, so no one would be any wiser to this without tracking the price.

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