Sound & Vision: The best Black Friday deals have already happened

If you’ve been browsing on your phone or coming to websites such as Trusted Reviews, there’s no doubt you’ve been peppered with early Black Friday deals.

And you know what? I’m not going to stray from the path as Black Friday has become an all-encompassing, massive shopping day for people around the world. It’s so big that it can’t really be called Black Friday anymore, starting earlier and earlier to the point where there are deals popping up in October, weeks before the original date, which is the last Friday in November.

I’m also not going to stray far from the messaging either, which is buy, buy, buy whatever you need to buy. What I will say is that it’s probably best if you don’t wait – if there’s something that you want, go get it now.

It used to be back in the day – whenever that was – that the perceived wisdom was that the best deals would drop on the actual day of Black Friday, so you would wait and wait until the item you were looking for dropped in price.

Every retailer would hold their powder and drop their best deals on that last Friday of November. But with Black Friday starting as early as late October and following on from Prime Day that’s occupying a mid-October spot, there’s no need to wait for the best deals to drop. They’re already available.

Having worked Black Friday for the last few years (and coming into work on the weekends too), I’ve often found that the deals on Black Friday can be great, but they’re not often the best I’ve seen. As I wrote about last year, where TVs are concerned, you could have bought a few of them for the same price as they were on Black Friday a month before, or a few weeks preceding it. Everyone’s attention is focused on the day and weekend Black Friday falls on, but you could have got the same deal ahead of time.

The only reason to wait, I would say, is to see if retailers try to one-up the other by bringing out even bigger discounts, but I don’t think that’d be on the big ticket/expensive items but for the more affordable and mid-tier products.

Take the 55-inch LG C3 for example. Currently it’s available at £1299 in most places, but I’d predict that when Black Friday comes around it’ll drop to £1199 – maybe even £1099 at a push – and if it does drop to £1299, you could have bought it for that price back at the beginning of October. If it falls more than that, feel free to call my powers of prognostication terrible.

Black Friday tends to splice in new deals with ones that it’s brought back. It’s not to say that Black Friday itself is a sham as it simply acts as a way to get many people’s eyeballs on discounts at the same time. But if there’s one piece of advice I’d share above all others, it’s that there’s little point in waiting for that magic deal to drop. It’s probably already available or happened already – jump straight in and get what you’re after and put a lid on that FOMO.