Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Prime Day sales are full of deception and trickery, and border on being outright scams.
Every year I find myself amazed at how many people still fall for these bullshit sales holidays. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Prime Day, whatever. They’re all giant rip-offs meant to separate gullible idiots from their money.
I remember the pre-internet age where people would line up outside of a store on Thanksgiving Day in anticipation for a midnight sale at whichever department store had the best “door-buster” sale. Door-buster was the perfect name for the sales, because once the poor underpaid employee unlocked the doors at midnight the customers would bust through like a bunch of starving lions who just spotted the last gazelle on Earth. People were quite literally trampled to death at these events.
This sort of behavior was exacerbated by the fact that retailers would often intentionally stock only one or two of the sale item, leading to some of the most disgusting and dystopian displays of inhumanity ever recorded. If people weren’t getting trampled to death, they were getting into fistfights. I can only imagine how many broken noses or black eyes came from people who wanted to save 40% on a new TV or grab the last Tickle-Me-Elmo.
While the growing focus on online shopping has calmed things down a bit, stores still run Black Friday specials, with some even starting them on Thursday evening. Unlike the old days, stores actually stock more than a few of the sale item.
The catch?
The items are usually of lower quality than the regular model.
Those discounted big-ticket items like TVs and other technology that you see for ridiculously low prices on Black Friday? Yeah, they’re not actually the same exact model. If you look closely at the item numbers you’ll usually see that they’re very similar but either off by a couple of numbers or with extra letters added. Manufacturers have taken to creating specific models just for Black Friday sales. These models are generally of lower quality than the model they’re trying to make you think you’re getting. You really thought you were getting that $1,000 4K OLED TV for $400? No, you’re getting a 4K QLED TV with low quality internals that will probably crap out on you after a year, just in time for the next bogus sale.
That’s not just me speculating either, here’s a news article going back to 2015 that explains this scummy practice. Retailers and manufacturers obfuscate product information just enough to trick hapless consumers but not enough to be considered deception. Is it a scam? Technically, no. But it’s still bullshit. They’re essentially skating on the line of false advertising without overtly crossing it. It’s deceptive but still legal, and every year clueless idiots still fall for it.
Cyber Monday isn’t much better. While it’s much easier to research a product before buying online (once you learn how to sift through the shill reviews; PROTOP: Disregard most of Reddit and anything that says “Vine Voice”), Cyber Monday, Prime Day, and the other online shopping events come with their own set of scams and tricks.
While the trick of manufacturing low-quality stuff specifically for the sale still applies, the biggest trick by far is the false discount.
If I don’t need an item right away I’ll let it sit in my Amazon cart for a while and watch the price. I always know when a sale event is coming because I’ll watch the price of an item jump up a few dollars after remaining the same price for the entire year. Then once Prime Day rolls around, boom, I’m offered a “special Prime Day deal” of the same price the item was originally.
How is this legal, you ask? I learned how this works during my time at ShopRite.
Basically, the law states that you can’t advertise something as “on sale” if it remains the same price year-round. To circumvent this, ShopRite and other retailers raise the price of the item for two weeks every year, then put it back “on sale” for the rest of the year. As long as you raise the price of an item for a minimum of two weeks out of the year, you can advertise it as a special deal for the other 50 weeks. Again, not overtly a scam, but it’s a deceptive practice that evades being considered false advertising on a technicality.
If you don’t want to clutter your cart like me, there are plenty of tools out there that allow you to track price histories. CamelCamelCamel is the most popular one, but there are others like Is There Any Deal. Check price histories for patterns, it’s entirely possible that your item goes “on sale” very often and you’re not getting a deal. The opposite is also possible, and you might discover that the item gets discounted even further at certain times every year.
Keep in mind though, some Amazon items go on sale with coupons, and to my knowledge these sites don’t track that.
If you’re looking for actual deals, I’ve found that Slickdeals is pretty reliable. The deals posted are usually vetted by site staff as well as users, and if you’re ever unsure if a deal is actually good check the comments. Most of the time someone has either bought the item or been tracking the price and will tell others if it’s really worth it. The site staff does receive kickbacks for purchases made through Slickdeals, but as long as the deals are actually good that doesn’t bother me. Again, you can always check the comments when in doubt. When events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Prime Day roll around, the Slickdeals front page is usually full of upcoming deals and sales, so that’s something to keep in mind if you’re thinking about grabbing something.
And no, I’m not being paid to promote Slickdeals. Though I am highly open to the idea.
So while there may be a few actual decent sales out there, for the most part shopping holidays like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Prime Day are giant loads of bullshit full of deceptive practices that narrowly skirt the criteria for being scams. Exercise caution when buying sale items, and take a moment to do a bit of research first.