Black Friday Deals 2023: What are Black Friday Deals?
If you’re looking to shop for Black Friday deals right now, you’ve come to the right place. While the official Black Friday 2022 date lands on November 25, retailers launch early sales with incredible offers on everything from TVs, AirPods, and cheap laptops to coffee makers, air fryers, vacuums, and more.
Our team is scouring all your favorite online shopping sites to bring you the best Black Friday deals we’ve spotted. So what Black Friday sales are live, and what are today’s hottest deals?
Walmart just launched its first wave of Black Friday deals, and we predict the hottest offers will go fast, like this Keurig K Express coffee maker for just $35(opens in new tab) and smart TVs starting at just $98(opens in new tab).
Amazon also has early Black Friday deals running on its site, with massive discounts on best-selling items like Apple’s AirPods Pro 2 are on sale for a record-low price of $234(opens in new tab).
Best Buy, Target, Dell, and Home Depot are just a handful of other retailers that have launched early Black Friday deals on kitchen appliances, big-screen TVs, laptops, Christmas decor, and so much more.
While Black Friday started over in the US as a way to profit off the Christmas shopping rush that followed the country’s Thanksgiving holiday, the sale has since established its presence around the world, including here in the UK.
Over the years, Black Friday has grown to be one of the busiest retail periods of the year and (more importantly) a fantastic occasion to secure a deal ahead of Christmas.
However, with almost every retailer seemingly cashing in on the looming sale with competing offers, codes, and cashback, it can be hard to sort the great deals from the just okay ones.
Then there’s Cyber Monday, another sale that proceeds Black Friday just days later, making the whole weekend blur into one overwhelming event.
Luckily for you, we’ve broken down everything you need to know about Black Friday in this guide. Keep reading to discover everything you should know about the November sale, including what days it’ll take place this year, where you can go to find the best Black Friday deals, and how Cyber Monday fits into the weekend.
If you’re already feeling like a Black Friday aficionado and want to get to the best Black Friday deals as quickly as possible, then simply follow that link and you’ll be taken to our page dedicated to compiling the Black Friday sale’s best offers.
When is Black Friday?
Black Friday takes place on the Friday after Thanksgiving, which means this year you can expect the sale to kick off on November 25.
Of course, that doesn’t mean the sale is restricted to this day. Over the years, Black Friday has evolved into a weekend-long affair concluding with Cyber Monday. Some retailers – such as Amazon – have even started dropping offers days or weeks before the sale “officially” begins.
As we know it today, Black Friday is the biggest sales event of the year and has grown into a worldwide phenomenon, but Black Friday started out as a simple term to describe the beginning of the holiday shopping season once the Thanksgiving festivities were out of the way.
The origin of the term is still speculated to this day, but one of its earliest uses dates back to the 1960s, referring to the obscene amounts of traffic that occurred once the Christmas shopping frenzy began.
It might be easier to ask which retailers don’t take part in Black Friday, as you could probably count those ones on one hand. That number gets even smaller when talking specifically about tech retailers, with all the major stores taking part as they try to best the competition with better deals on phones, laptops, TVs, and more.
For a look at which retailers have been involved in previous years, just scroll through the list below.
- Amazon
- AO
- Aromatherapy Associates
- Argos
- ASOS
- Aspinal
- Beauty Bay
- Benefit
- Boden
- Boots
- Curry’s PC World
- Dell
- Disney
- eBay
- Ebuyer
- Feelunique
- Fonehouse
- GAP
- GiffGaff
- Ghost
- Hamleys
- John Lewis
- Joules
- Karen Millen
- Lakeland
- Liberty
- Microsoft
- Mobile Phones Direct
- Ninja
- Now
- OnBuy
- Panasonic
- Plusnet
- Shark Clean
- ShopTo
- Simba
- Smythson
- Three
- Very
- VOXI
- Wayfair
- Wex Photo Video
- Zavvi
Why stick with Trusted Reviews this Black Friday?
For longer than any of us probably care to remember, Trusted Reviews has been at the forefront of the Black Friday sale, bringing you the best offers as they appear, and this year will be no different.
Throughout the Black Friday sale and beyond, we will be scouring the internet for the absolute best tech deals so that you can save a serious amount of cash on your next purchase. Think of it as being able to enjoy the Black Friday sale without all the stress of it all (we’ve got that part sorted).
What are Black Friday Deals?
Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving. During this annual shopping holiday, retailers typically offer steep discounts to kick off the holiday season.
- Black Friday is not an official holiday but falls on the date after Thanksgiving. Some people spend the day finding discounts from retailers to kick off the holiday shopping season.
- It’s a critical day for the retail sector, as the holiday season can account for 20% or more of annual sales for many retailers.
- Other financial “holidays” have also sprung up around this time, including Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday.
Why is it Called Black Friday Deals?
Black Friday is an informal name used to describe the day after Thanksgiving. It’s often the busiest shopping day of the year because it kicks off the holiday season. This day can be crucial for the economy, especially for certain retailers.
The term “Black Friday” has its roots in the middle of the 20th century. Police in Philadelphia initially used the term “Black Friday” to refer to heavy, disruptive traffic on the day after Thanksgiving.
The term spread and businesses latched onto it. It worked well for retail businesses that depended on holiday shopping to put their finances “in the black” (earning profit) rather than “in the red” (operating at a loss).
How to check if a Black Friday Deal is fake: Four tips
- Check the price of the product across multiple websites This is the most basic check you can do, but our research found that 13% of Black Friday shoppers didn’t do this in 2017. We’ve often found that more than one shop will sell a product at a similar price, but only one claims that the price is a special offer.
For example, if four shops are selling the same washing machine for £250, but only one is claiming it’s a special offer at ‘Now £250, was £300’, it’s a pretty good indicator that the price is not a particularly special deal.
Of course, if you’re happy to pay £250 for that particular washing machine, that’s fine. But don’t snap it up thinking you’re getting a bargain.
- Check the price history Use our reviews app to make a shortlist of the products you want to look out for in the Black Friday sales, and then look them up on websites such as Pricerunner, PriceSpy and CamelCamelCamel (Amazon only) to find out their price history.
This will enable you to know whether Black Friday prices are genuinely worth getting excited about.
- Be wary of ‘was’ prices Claims such as ‘were £100, now £50’ are abundant on Black Friday. But don’t let these ‘anchor prices’ mislead you.
Retailers shout about savings – often in red to grab attention – as a way of influencing customers and they can be quite misleading.
When we looked at items on special offer across major retailers for the first half of 2020, we found that several products were listed at their lower price for longer than they were at their full ‘was’ price.
We’ve also found retailers using old RRPs (recommended retail prices) as ‘was’ prices, so they reflect the value of the item when it was first released, not its current value. And Amazon displays every price reduction as if it was a promotion, so even a price drop as small as 1p will be flagged as a discount.
Rather than automatically trusting anchor prices, it’s better to check against other shops’ prices to try to work out the true value of the item you’re buying.
- Look out for notes or signs explaining offers The rules that govern special offers are vague. In some instances, shops can get away with using ‘was’ prices that haven’t been in place for a long time if they put up a sign explaining the deal. Tactics such as this can make offers look better than they are.
We’ve seen notes that explained the product was actually only at the higher price for a fortnight, six months before the current offer.
Sometimes these notes are well flagged, but sometimes they’re completely buried – meaning we’ve had to scroll through masses of small print to uncover vague wording – so it’s worth doing some thorough research if you want to be confident you’re getting the best deal.
When we checked promotions in 2020, AO.com had its explanations below the item description, specification, and customer reviews, while at Currys they were in a small grey font.
Not all manufacturers have RRPs, but some do and choose to display them on their own websites. Before you buy a product in the sale, check the manufacturer’s website to see if you’re getting a decent discount on the RRP.
