Thanksgiving in the US marks the official start of the holiday buying season for everything, including consumer electronics in all shapes and forms. While the holiday buying season had already started in August this year, if we include the aisles of holiday merchandise which started to show up in various department stores, we wondered what there is to make Black Friday different.
Which brings us to a new subject – ‘Black Friday’ and the “Doorbuster “deal. Since Thanksgiving is observed always on the last Thursday in November, the Friday after Thanksgiving has become almost a national holiday for all business other than retail. This Friday is called Black Friday and retail businesses want to draw shoppers into their establishments by offering ridiculous low prices on selected items, hence the Doorbuster. These dreadful offers of super low priced merchandise do, of course, include consumer electronics and are often a sign of things to come. With more pressure on online retail in recent years, brick and mortar retailers have now extended sales to Thursday night. This gives holiday shopping a completely new meaning.
On Thanksgiving night, this early holiday shopping fever also extended to my family driving me out to the stores after a big Thanksgiving meal. First stop was Best Buy, our more or less struggling retail chain for all things CE. For the first time in my life, I spent 15 minutes outside the door before a friendly doorman let me in to this temple of consumer electronics. To be clear, we were not early, in fact the doors had opened an hour before, but there were so many 346 looking to spend their money that the store had to control the number of 346 it was letting in.
Wandering through the aisles, I saw many offerings worth mentioning. The image shows some of the deals that were available.
What caught my eye was the number of TV and computer offerings that saw many consumers leaving the store with a 40″ or 50″ TV under their arm. Now I finally understand the drive of the TV industry to make these TVs lighter and lighter. But Wow! $199.99 for a 50″ Panasonic LED TV! I wonder how much it actually cost to make and ship this TV to the US? I don’t really believe that the manufacturers are losing money on the deal, as there was a full crate of TVs standing on the floor. There were also other deals of second tier brand TVs at even lower prices. This means that TVs below 40″ are actually approaching impulse buy territory, at least by price, but there is still the question of how many TVs you actually want to hang on your walls?
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At the higher end Best Buy offered a 55″ 4K/UHD TV from Samsung for $899.99. Yes, UHD TV is here to stay and will make a big splash in the TV market. These prices were not unheard of just a few years ago for a 1080p HD TV of the same size. Welcome to the new world full of pixels. Now we can go back to figuring out what we can watch on our new TVs that is not scaled.
There were also other offers available for smartphones and PCs. Popular smartphones were available with no deposit and with a new two year contract, as well as PCs at hundreds of dollars off the normal retail price.
The best part for me was that I finally got my new iPhone 6 in the color I wanted and I had only to wait about an hour to get it. Success! Happy Holidays! – Norbert Hildebrand
