According to a recent WalletHub survey, 51 percent of Americans no longer believe that Black Friday offers the best deals of the year.
And, based on new research by the personal finance site, they’re right.
The website compared the advertised Black Friday prices of a broad selection of doorbusters against what the same items sold for within the past four weeks on Amazon (Oct. 19-Nov. 15). What the researchers found was that 14 percent of the advertised specials offered no savings at all over pre-holiday prices, and that Black Friday deals on consumer tech and home appliances in particular are the least discounted out of nine general product categories.
See: Black Friday Begins On Thursday At Best Buy
Specifically, the average price differential for Black Friday and pre-Black Friday retails are 30 percent for appliances, 26 percent for general CE, and 25 percent for computers and phones. By comparison, the No. 1 most discounted category, jewelry, will offer average savings of 73 percent on Black Friday, WalletHub said, followed by books/movies/music, which will be discounted by 48 percent, based on sales ads collected by BestBlackFriday.com.
One CE exception is video game software, which on average will sell for 39 percent less on Black Friday, placing it at fourth place on the category discount charts.
Another anomaly: Tech sellers placed high on WalletHub’s “good deals” ranking, based on their percentage of Black Friday prices that are lower than Amazon’s pre-holiday retails. Among them, Microsoft scored 100 percent; Dell earned a 97 percent; and Best Buy and Newegg.com both posted a 90 percent rating.
Indeed, Best Buy is offering what WalletHub considers one of the best overall deals of Black Friday: a 17.3-inch Asus Tuf gaming laptop with Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB memory, 512GB solid state drive and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card for $1,000, a Black Friday savings of 200 bucks.
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Surprisingly, Walmart came in next to last, just above Macy’s, with only 61 percent of its Black Friday deals out-discounting Amazon.
See: Amazon’s Black Friday Sales Start Today
The complete report, including the seven top Black Friday deals by retailer, is available at WalletHub.
