Camelcamelcamel is a must have site for anything on Amazon, along with Review Meta for filtering out the fake / bought reviews too.
I think the approach of “do your research and only buy if you need it” is a fair one. I have been after a new TV, and while all the deals are coming in, the specs aren’t quite what I want, and the deals actually aren’t that great compared to other times in the year.
Fair point, and I’ve definitely noticed this myself where I’ve had items sitting in my Amazon basket for months (though I did read at least one piece of research which I thought was a little unfair in that it also looked at the six months after Black Friday as well as before - in those cases, it doesn’t always mean that the Black Friday deal wasn’t a good price at that time.)
I second that recommendation. I almost never order anything from Amazon without checking that site first now. It really does give you information to help you make a decision when you can see if a price is a spike or a trend.
Along those lines, I can also recommend Invisible Hand. Install it in your browser, and if you’re looking at something on Amazon it’ll tell you if you can get it cheaper elsewhere.
Two for one for the Hidden London exhibition at the London Transport Museum (not a Black Friday offer but…) and £30 tickets to see Ian McKellen on Friday night (not a Black Friday offer but…)
Fridge-freezer for £369, which according to the delivery guy was an absolute steal, new TV for £429, a pair of headphones down to £84.99 from £249.99 and a couple of kids Kindle Fires for christmas presents, was a bit of a busy black friday
I was on the verge of buying a Nest Hub for £59 on Friday, but I realised I can live just fine without it. Also been looking at some noise cancelling headphones, but waiting until after Christmas and New Year to decide if I still want/need them - by which time I’ll know whether to get the Sony or Bose. I was astonished by the number of people who were mindlessly grabbing items off the shelf just because they were reduced!
But I’ve ran out of hard drive space on my desktop machine and all my various external drives, so I pulled the trigger on an 8TB Seagate that was about £60 off the regular price.
I had that problem a few months back, ended up investing in a home NAS system. Didn’t have huge TB’s worth of data, but a lot of stuff spread out onto many 500gb drives.
It’s now all living on a NAS which is a bit more back up proof, and backed up to the cloud automatically, and accessible like my own personal Dropbox system.