Black Friday is no longer just a day, but a whole period of frenzy in UK supermarkets and shops: some sales started in mid-November, and many will last until Cyber Monday (2 December). Argos, Aldi, Tesco and Amazon are just a few of the retailers offering some pretty substantial discounts. But when you go shopping, you need to bear in mind that not everything is better value for money right now.
MoneySavingExpert research has found that more than two-thirds of 50 popular products were cheaper on Black Friday in 2023 than they were in the run-up to Christmas. Which means that if an item has a decent discount on Black Friday, it’s worth grabbing it straight away. However, the PriceSpy price comparison site has unveiled another unscrupulous marketing technique at a huge scale: ‘fake sales‘, when prices rise before artificially falling.
PriceSpy’s analysis shows that prices have risen by around 1.5 million since October, meaning that the prices of many products have been raised prior to being lowered. For example, the Henry Quick Cordless vacuum cleaner was £239, but on 18 October it rose to £289 and then dropped to a ‘sale’ price of £199. So the discount is only £40 off the original price, not £100 as they try to tell shoppers. According to the researchers, 85% of the items on sale could be found cheaper or at the same price at other times of the year.
In addition, analysts warn: be wary of unusually large discounts and extra delivery charges: 10% of Black Friday offers turn out to be fake. There are cases when retailers increase the cost of delivery to compensate for the price reduction, so it’s wise to consider the full cost of the purchase. On Amazon, for example, you can use the free CamelCamelCamel price tracker to track an item’s price history.
Furthermore, every year Consumer Champion Which? finds products on sale that you shouldn’t buy at all: they either haven’t passed safety tests or just aren’t as good as advertised. And customer reviews can be fake too: an investigation by Which? in 2023 found that one in ten Amazon customers was offered a reward in exchange for a five-star review of a product.
Where did Black Friday come from? There are several versions of the origins of this phenomenon. It is said that in the 1950s, factory managers began calling the first Friday after Thanksgiving ‘Black Friday’ because many workers took sick leave on that day. And then the police in the US city of Philadelphia used the term to describe the chaos of the day as fans flocked to the city for the annual football game between the Army and Navy teams.
The term caught on and expanded its meaning. It has now become the time of year when companies hold their last sales before Christmas shopping begins. There are additions to the Black Friday calendar: there’s Cyber Monday (when certain tech items go on sale), Small Business Saturday and Giving Tuesday.
