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Here’s a few predictions for Black Friday. John Lewis will slash the price of Le Creuset pans. Amazon Fire tablets will be marked down by a third. Google Home Minis will drop towards £20. Top-end headphones with cables will plunge in price. And the price of (some) Dyson cordless vacuum cleaners will drop to their lowest ever level.
But how real are these Black Friday deals? Let’s take a look firstly at Amazon Fire tablets. This week (all prices correct Thursday 14 November) Amazon was selling the “All-new Fire 7 tablet” with 16GB storage for £49.99.
Now what’s the chances that on Amazon’s site it will be, say, £34.99 come Black Friday? Ermm … very, very high. How do I know this? No, not because Amazon have sent the press an embargoed list of their deals. Rather, it’s because Amazon dropped the price of these Fire tablets on its website in mid-October to £34.99, then put them back up again to £49.99. It’s going to be fairly obvious that Amazon can now knock £15 off the price again – or maybe a bit more.
The Fire tablets are actually pretty good, by all accounts. At about £35 they are tremendous value compared with an iPad. Just don’t imagine you’re being cute and pouncing on a never-before-seen bargain. You’ve just been lined up for it.
One trick is to look at websites such as CamelCamelCamel and Idealo – just paste in an item that’s currently on sale at Amazon, and they give a price history, noting if and when it was at a lower price. Both sites show me that the Fire 7 16 GB tablet was at the lower £34.99 price in both October and August.
On Friday, Argos jumped in with its “bonanza” of “brilliant bargains” Black Friday offers. What has it listed as one of its top deals? Yes, the Fire tablet, although it’s the smaller storage 8GB version which isn’t even pushed on the main Amazon site any longer. Argos is slashing the price from £49.99 to £29.99. I think you can fairly safely assume it won’t be heading back to £49.99 any time soon.
How about those Le Creuset pans at John Lewis? Right now, the John Lewis site is selling a set of four Le Creuset stainless steel pans for £399. Jeepers, you’ve got to be well-off to pay that. But John Lewis slashed the price of many of their Le Creusets last year, and can be expected to so the same again this year. Maybe, just maybe, hardly anyone ever pays the full price for these sorts of items. Take a look at the price history for the “signature” cast-iron 20cm Le Creuset casserole dish on Amazon. It’s been at £185 for much of November, is currently £138, and was £120 in late June and about that price last Black Friday.
The Google Home Mini looks like a yo-yo, and its price behaves the same way. Last Black Friday, Google dropped the price to £29 from £49. It went back up in price for a period after Black Friday, but for much of this year has been retailing at £29. I’ll take a wild guess that Google will cut the price again over the next week or two to £25 or even £20. But you won’t need to rush – you can be pretty sure that the deal will become the standard price pretty soon.
Many of the tech items “slashed in price” on Black Friday are simply last year’s models or where tech fashion has moved on. Sales of in-ear wireless headphones are booming – so the ones with cables have got to be shifted, pronto, with big price cuts. Cordless vacuum cleaners have now become commonplace – so retailers are slashing prices on the earlier Dysons.
None of these figures suggest you shouldn’t buy on Black Friday – just don’t be bounced into it by the frenzy of marketing. One email I received this week said we really should be at our computer screens at 6am on Black Friday to grab the best bargains. I don’t think I’ll be setting my alarm.
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