Resources for Black Friday
Shopping on Black Friday is not as simple as “Buy it because it’s the cheapest price all year!” You have to actually do your homework to figure out which items are actually a good buy.
Here’s some great resources to help you figure it out.
Check out the Black Friday ads to make your plan:
The first thing you should do is be prepared for Black Friday before it comes. You’ll do this by starting a few weeks in advance by reading through the ‘leaked’ Black Friday ad scans and seeing if there is any deals you’re interested in.
- Slickdeals Black Friday page – Not only does it have all the ad scans, it also has the normal Slickdeals voting system so you can tell what deals are actually deals.
Check the reviews:
Sadly, it’s all too common for review sites to be purchased and largely just paid advertising. Anything endorsed by Twitch streamers, celebrities, or any online personality through Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc – are almost 100% guaranteed to be paid advertising. Websites that are reliable and accurate one year turn into paid promotion sites with shocking regularity. You need to check who owns the sites and see if the founders are still standing behind their reviews.
- Hardware Unboxed – Good rating site that’s probably best for its gaming monitor reviews
- Monitors Unboxed – A dedicated subchannel of Hardware Unboxed that is just monitors.
- RTings – good for TV’s and monitors
Tools for reviews:
- CamelCamelCamel – check this historical price of any item on Amazon and see if it’s really on sale, or not. Just be aware that Amazon often changes the product links, serial numbers, and other tricks so you can’t get a long-term historical price on some items.
- FakeSpot – a website that uses AI to determine how fake the reviews of a product are. Sadly, too many products are subject to very easily manipulated fake reviews. Some utilize very sophisticated methods, other markets like the mattress review industry are almost fully controlled or owned by the mattress companies themselves.
- Interesting article from Fast Company on how mattress companies bullied, coerced with lawsuits, and bought out review sites. This was from 2016, so you can be assured it’s become more standard practice.