Technology

When will fediverse allow more than one upvote!? Until then, I can only give you this one

I agree with you, but the word "need" means different things to different people...

That’s why I love deal communities like Slickdeals, if the deal sucks someone will be calling it out

This is very noticeable on Amazon especially. So many “deals” from budget brands or one-off Chinese brands that nobody has never heard of. This is especially noticeable on Prime Day too.

I have worked with buyers at Best Buy that negotiate these “deals”. The manufacturers will create a near identical version of a higher quality product, but the model number will be a sub-model (like -a). When uninformed consumers are bargain shopping for a deal they will see that the “same” model is more expensive elsewhere and think they are getting a deal. This sub-model product will have cheaper components and fewer features and a higher product margin.

Some of these products would have very high failure rates but the companies still keep doing this because it helps to push their extended warranties. Then people buy them even when they buy higher quality products because they remember the failure on the other one.

Long story short, don’t shop on Black Friday for deals in electronics.

That's undoubtedly true in general, but there are exceptions. For example:

It's a little hard to tell just looking at specifications without directly comparing in person, but I think the Costco Black Friday-specific version of the Roland FP-10 digital piano actually manages to be better than the normal version (even before you consider that it's cheaper and comes with a bunch of accessories). Specifically, it has 128 voice polyphony instead of the regular 96, and the only other difference I can find is that it advertises "a custom selection of tones curated by Roland and Costco exclusively for the FRP-2-ACR," which I hope doesn't mean they're worse.

Amazon also secretly ran an algorithm called project Nessie that just straight up creates inflation.

It initially started with tech saavy who are in the know how of prices getting a good deal, but the more casual the practice became, so did the sale value as well, as it switched from techies getting a good deal to corpo creating black friday specific products to trick the layperson that theyre getting a good deal.

Sales are only good if the average person doing the shopping is also in the knowhow for pricing.

Camelcamelcamel.com forever

And maybe sneakily lower specs. They absolutely do that with televisions.

Would make sense because laptop companies always push out new products for back to school, and usually cpu releases happen months before back to school to allow production to ramp up to account for the sales.

Camel Camel Camel is pretty good price tracker too.

There was an article a couple years back saying that manufacturers will use cheaper components for the same products, making it LOOK like the same TV but it's actually built cheaper. The really bad ones will keep the same product number/SKU but others will usually append a letter or two.

So the over all cost might be less but you're actually getting a poor quality version.

In my place, discounts are 90% off but they increase MSRP before the discount.

So end result.... same price before discount.

Y'all are also smart enough to know and prohibit retailers from boosting prices just before discounting them to trick consumers into thinking they're getting a huge deal when they're actually paying average, or above average cost for the product.

I'm sure you know, but I want to add to this in case others do not.

These product lines are usually really poor quality. They might look like the original and have a similar model number, but a TV, for example, will have less ports, lower resolution screen, or a lower quality screen.

So, if it is an electronic, look up the model number and if you can't see a lot of reviews for it, then this is why.

A friend of mine once had this big ass box in his living room. I asked what the deal with that is. He said he bought a tv because it was "too cheap to not buy" the tv was worse than the one he had, so he moved that tv like twice and after 3 or so years he gave it away because he moved in with his girlfriend who also already had a tv. He still somehow thinks that was a good investment because how cheap it was.

The logic is that you buy what you need during this time, but it became a scam a few years back.

Your link needs more link.

This comment brought to you by the authors of modern news article titles.

Which day is?? Or is it not one specific day of the year?