this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2024
918 points (99.0% liked)
memes
10504 readers
3859 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- [email protected] : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- [email protected] : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- [email protected] : Linux themed memes
- [email protected] : for those who love comic stories.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
But definitely double check SKUs. A lot of Black Friday products are more cheaply made than their usual counterparts, even if they outwardly seem like the same product.
I used to work at Best Buy in the Video department. We got all new products shipped in just for Black Friday. One year we got these $40 VCRs (I realize I'm dating myself here) that we must have sold a billion of. Within the week, we had so many returns that we didn't have any place to put them.
Similarly Best Buy's brand, Insignia, is a mix mashed TV full of components from other TV brands (unless that has changed in the last 4 years). They're usually the ones to go on deep discount but, due to the nature of the internals not being from one company, they're nearly impossible to repair.
So, although your Insignia may last a year and a half or two, the Sharp panel may fail, the Phillips backlight could fail, or the PCB from Samsung could fail, adding to more e-waste.
I've read this for years but never personally seen it.
TVs are a classic example. I found luggage accidentally one time years ago. Was so poorly made I was shocked it hasn't disintegrated in transit. Immediately returned it. When I did some research, it looked like none had ever actually sold off that SKU until Black Friday, and they had a stupid price listed months before hand for that deep discount the day of.
Check out black friday tvs, then look them up online. Won't take long to find one that's "cheap"
I saw it when I worked retail (which was a long time ago, so I guess as an anecdote, add an extra grain of salt; maybe things have changed but I doubt it).
We would get pallets of product right before Black Friday, and curiously, they would overlap with product we already had in the store. For example, if we carried a 40" TV from brand X (TVs are very notorious for this Black Friday swapping), we'd get a pallet of 40" TVs from brand X which looked exactly the same, had the same specs on the box, but a different SKU. In some cases we were instructed to remove the original stock and replace it with the Black Friday stock, which would be priced lower.
As others have mentioned, returns on the sale stock would be high. And there would be interesting differences, like an obviously cheaper remote or an overall lighter unit.
And of course sometimes there was no overlap -- we'd get some product from some no name brand that just sat out in the aisle on its pallet. These were absolutely only brought in for Black Friday and I have to assume they were the cheapest imaginable garbage inside.
I've never sought out a Black Friday sale since those days.