We look forward to how the Black Friday sales in 2020 are going to differ to previous years.
It feels as if Black Friday 2020 is going to be different as the date, November 27, gets closer – online deals are going to dominate more than they have in past years. First, Walmart, Best Buy and Target are all giving their staff Thanksgiving off this year, with the stores not opening amid the backdrop of the global pandemic. Best Buy confirmed it will be spreading out the deals this year, rather than just forcing them into a single weekend period, and it’s expected other retailers will follow suit. So what does that mean for AirPods deals and the best laptop sales of the period? Well, firstly, it’s likely there will be a lot more online traffic – with retailers possibly offering more click and collect options for those who want to still venture out and pick up their goods by the curbside. What it won’t mean is throngs of people queueing up at all the traditional retailers – while some will likely remain open as normal, social distancing is almost certain to be in effect, so the packed queues and stampedes aren’t going to be part of 2020’s tradition. There’s also the point that Amazon Prime Day 2020 is going to be much later this year, rumored to be in early October. This will mean the Black Friday and Prime Day existing in close proximity in the calendar, and could have a gravitational pull on the sales that are snapped up when buying holiday gifts. Additionally, Walmart Plus may arrive with very similar deals to compete with Amazon. The possible rise in online sales isn’t something that’s surprising, even without the pandemic, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals already set to rise in 2020. According to Adobe Analytics,2019 saw a near-20% uplift in traffic for those searching for savings on their holiday gifts. Whether the same things will be big winners will depend on the attitude towards spending – where last year it was toys in the most-purchased category and the Nintendo Switch as the big console,this year it might be the PS5 or Xbox Series X as the big winners. We tracked last year’s Black Friday deals closely, and we saw a number of hot sales from Walmart, Best Buy and Amazon that impressed – Target was also a big player in the technology space, aping the best iPad deal down to $250 for the base-level iPad from Apple. Whether that continues in 2020 remains to be seen, but there will still be top deals to be grabbed. It’s odd that consoles were so highly-sold lasts year, as we had little in the way of a cracking Nintendo Switch Black Friday deal, and even the PS4 deals – while they existed, and weren’t too bad – were more scarce than we expected. Other winners were Apple products, with $400 cashback on an iPhone 11, lower prices on AirPods and Apple Watches and MacBook / iPads being cheaper than ever before – and people bought them in their droves. We saw Dyson being popular for Black Friday last time around, DNA kits a surprise package and we even saw great discounts on power tools as well. So what does this tell us for Black Friday 2020? Well, as mentioned with the new consoles incoming, the current range of PS4, Xbox and Nintendo Switch deals will be improved. Apple’s AirPods Pro are mature in the market now, so we’re expecting big discounts there (far more than the $15 drop we saw last year) and the AirPods Classic might even creep closer to $100, which would be a great saving and see Apple clean up on something that could be popped into a (fairly affluent) stocking. However, there’s nothing this year that suggests the likes of Instant Pot, TVs, laptops (which were huge this year too) along with Amazon’s best own-brand products won’t be the things to wait to buy on Black Friday 2020 – so expect more of the same and time your top purchases accordingly.Black Friday, for the tiny amount of people that don’t know, is the Friday immediately after Thanksgiving when retailers begin the holiday shopping season. It was based around the aforementioned “doorbusters”, discounts so impressive that bargain-crazed customers will try to break the doors down before the shop opens – although that won’t be the case this year with social distancing. The actual date shifts every year, by the day of the week stays the same: it’s always the Friday after Thanksgiving, and like last year it’s later in the month of November. The official Black Friday date is November 27,2020, meaning it’s close to Christmas again (under a month before Christmas Day), and that gives you less time to shop online. That may not seem like a big deal today, but you’ll have to factor in waiting on the best deals, pouncing on the lowest price, and factoring shipping wait times. As we’ve highlighted,Black Friday weekend isn’t just a four-day affair, and deals don’t necessarily follow the normal pattern of prime products to be unleashed – you can see new TV deals in the small hours of the morning or a brilliant wearable price slash just after the Thanksgiving turkey is prepped, so shoppers need to be more flexible than ever. With the outbreak causing retailers to be less specific in their timing for unleashing deals, it could be harder than ever to spot when a new, impressive deal appears. Let’s take a Black Friday history lesson: the first known mention of Black Friday related to this shopping experience was in November 1951, when the journal Factory Management and Maintenance used it to describe people calling in sick the day after Thanksgiving so they could have an extra day off work.
