We’ve spent hours poring over circulars and ads to pick out the top discounts coming later this week.
The most difficult part of Black Friday shopping is knowing when to hold. As prices start dropping, the temptation to pounce on the first decent discount becomes overwhelming.
Since forewarned is forearmed, we’ve gone through popular retailers’ Black Friday advertisements to find the gems arriving Thursday and Friday, and listed our findings below. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to compare prices and more accurately judge when to grab an early deal and when to wait a couple more days.
Don’t expect to wait idly and be triumphant, though. Stores can spontaneously undercut their own advertised prices, and days ahead of the planned sale date—all part of the game of chicken that retailers currently play with each other.
So if you see something you like in the lists below, start monitoring its price now, lest it go on sale earlier than expected and run out of stock before you get a shot at it.
The deals I’ve selected are near, at, or below the lowest known price. Still, that’s not saying a lot for some product categories (like graphics cards and RAM), where the lowest-known price didn’t dip too much below MSRP before everything went sky-high.
On the whole, 2018’s discounts are more conservative than those of previous years—I’m seeing Black Friday-style price drops only on products that a vendor really wants to move, like the Google Home Mini and Amazon Echo Dot. Let’s hope this isn’t a sign of bad prices in 2019.
If we called out every single great deal below, the list would be pretty unwieldy, so I’ve summarized the outlook for a handful of popular product categories. It’s not comprehensive, though. Take a look at the actual deals for the full story.
Believe it or not, $20 off a set of Airpods is actually an excellent deal.
The price on the Ryzen 7 1800X has dropped dramatically since its debut in 2017. It’s currently $200 at Micro Center!
Linksys’s excellent Velop mesh router system is available for a great price this Black Friday.
Best Buy’s physical stores open at 5 p.m. Thursday, November 22. Previously we’ve seen deals start going live on Wednesday evening, and the company’s also been offering select deals early this year, so be ready to jump on these bargains early.
Dell’s sales start on Thursday, November 22, with the best of the bunch slated to start at specific times of the day. Set an alarm or reminder if any of those “doorbusters” catch your eye.
HP’s deals should start on Thursday, November 22. The time isn’t clear, so we recommend checking at midnight, then every few hours afterward until it’s live.
