You've polished off your pumpkin pie and the fights with your relatives are fading into memory. It can only mean one thing: Black Friday is well and truly here. There are huge savings on iPads, laptops, consoles and more live right now from major stores such as Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy and others. We've spent the past several weeks prepping, and the past few days collating, and you can see the result of our work below: Dozens of stories focusing on the best Black Friday deals at all major retailers,
Here's the ultimate sales guide to keep your head from spinning (and your budget on track) this holiday shopping season. And of course, the Cheapskate's top Black Friday picks.
Best Buy: Wednesday, Nov. 27 at 9:01 p.m. PT (Thursday, Nov. 28 at 12:01 a.m. ET)
Target: Sales started Wednesday, Nov. 27, but timing is complicated According to Target: "On Nov. 27, early access deals begin at approximately 2:01 a.m. CT (12:01 a.m. PT, 3 a.m. ET) for credit and debit RedCard holders and 6 p.m. CT (4 p.m. PT, 7 p.m. ET) for Target Circle members. RedCard early access price applied when you use your RedCard at checkout on Target.com. Target Circle early access price applied when you sign into your Target.com account at checkout on Target.com after 6 p.m. CT. Target Circle and RedCard Black Friday early access offers are not the same, and all deals will be revealed on Nov. 27."
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How to get great deals on Black Friday
The demonstrations are expected to intensify the debate about the environmental impact of Black Friday, which some French lawmakers want to ban in the country.
Earlier this week France's Environment Minister Elisabeth Borne warned against the "consumption frenzy" linked to Black Friday.
The shopping day, during which retailers claim to offer large discounts, began in the US on the Friday after Thanksgiving but has in recent years spread to other countries.
Why did the activists target Amazon?
Environmentalists have accused Amazon of accelerating climate change through its rapid delivery services, which they say contribute to greenhouse gases emissions.
At Thursday's protest, about 40km (24 miles) south of Paris, some activists held banners which read: "Amazon: for the climate, for employment, stop expanding, stop over-production".
Where else are protests expected?
The blockade was part of the "Block Friday" demonstrations that are aiming to disrupt Amazon's business operations nationwide.
More demonstrations are expected on Friday, with environmental groups threatening to turn November 29 into a "Black Day for Amazon".
As of Friday morning, dozens of activists from various groups had gathered outside Amazon France's facilities, including its headquarters in Clichy, north-west of Paris.
One of the groups, anti-globalisation movement Attac, said it will "take action across France to disrupt Amazon's business".
In a statement on Twitter, Amazon France said (in French) that it respects "everyone's right to express their opinions" but disagrees with the means used by Attac.
"Amazon's priority is to serve its customers and deliver on its delivery promises," it said. "Our network is robust, reliable, and flexible, and we continue to deliver to our customers without interruption while ensuring the safety of our employees."
A third of people surveyed by YouGov France said they were not planning to take part in this year's Black Friday sales. A majority of respondents - 57% - said they believe Black Friday promotions are false.
Are French MPs banning Black Friday?
Some MPs want to, citing concerns over the effects of consumerism on the planet.
An "anti-waste" bill was amended to include a proposal to prohibit Black Friday by a French legislative committee on Monday.
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France's former environment minister Delphine Batho tabled the amendment, which will be debated next month in the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament.
"Black Friday celebrates a model of consumption that is anti-ecological and anti-social," said MP Mattieu Orphelin, a former member of President Emmanuel Macron's LREM party.
A trade union in France has opposed the proposal. So too have conservative MPs, including Republican lawmaker Eric Woerth, who called the debate over the amendment a "useless row".
Meanwhile, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo is considering implementing new regulations to protect the climate, including a tax on deliveries to ease traffic jams and pollution caused by Amazon and other companies.
In the age of e-commerce, Black Friday can feel like an anachronism. But don’t be fooled. The Friday after Thanksgiving remains enormously important — at least symbolically — to the retail industry. And millions of shoppers will still be out in stores, working off that turkey and stuffing by racing to find the best deals.
Many others will simply stay at home, content to cruise the internet to do their shopping. Whether it’s in stores or online, our reporters will be covering it here, with a little help from our friends at The Wirecutter.
Shopping has become easier, and more fun
It’s hard to think of a better time to be a shopper. There’s one-day delivery, online purchases with in-store pick up, even $17 cocktails served while you shop for shoes.
Retailers are trying to be all things to all shoppers, but it is proving to be a tough and, some say, unsustainable way to run their business. The more money retailers invest in new initiatives to boost sales, the more their profit margins seem to shrink.
Dozens of retailers have warned that profits in the all-important fourth quarter, which includes holiday sales, are likely to be lower than previously expected.
Amazon is driving a lot of this pain, as old-school retailers try to catch up with the online giant, which sets the standard for speed and convenience.
-Michael Corkery
Hoping to find Gucci in the bargain bin
When Barneys, the iconic Manhattan department store, was sold for pieces last month, it marked the end of an era in New York retailing. It also set the hearts of consumers racing, as talk of an unprecedented liquidation sale swirled. What sorts of deals could be had on cashmere? Would Gucci be in the bargain bin?
Alas, consumers have since been disappointed. Barneys’ liquidators — led by B. Riley Financial’s Great American Group — have largely limited the discounts to just 5 percent or 10 percent off the chain’s luxury wares. Twitter has been rife with incredulous shoppers. “I just checked out Barneys New York closing down sale and socks are $97,” one user wrote. Another remarked that they needed more than 10 percent off, noting, “This is like a rich folks sale.”
This week, however, B. Riley said it would deepen discounts at Barneys beginning on Wednesday, for an average of 30 to 35 percent off items throughout the weekend. It promised additional promotions for in-store shoppers. There’s a chance that will spur consumers into action — though shoppers may continue to wait for even bigger discounts during December, as the liquidators will have to offload all of the inventory at some point.
-Sapna Maheshwari
Five things to avoid on Black Friday
Though you’d think now is when you’ll find the best deals on, well, everything on your wish list, The Wirecutter Deals team has found that’s not exactly the case.
If you’ve got your eye on big exercise equipment, mattresses, or organizational products, you’re better off waiting a few months for more impressive price drops. Treadmills and ellipticals, for example, almost always see better discounts in January. So do items for maximizing storage, like bins and dividers, just in time to help people achieve their resolutions. Mattresses from online brands, on the other hand, see a drop in prices during Presidents’ Day sales in February.
Other things to steer clear of this Black Friday are not so much specific products as they are ideas you may be susceptible to, like buying in bulk or buying something you already have just because the price is good. Both are better in theory than they are in practice: Very few people actually need 40 snack bags of Cheetos or a third Bluetooth speaker, no matter how badly they’re tempted.
-Elissa Sanci
In Europe, mixed emotions over Black Friday
Thanksgiving is just another Thursday in Europe, but Black Friday is a bone of contention: embraced by some and rejected by others as an alarming invasion of American consumerism.
Black Friday sales can be found in many countries, from small stationers to major chains to car dealers. In Britain, many retailers, like John Lewis & Partners, a source of appliances and furniture, started offering Black Friday discounts days ago. Curry’s PC World, an electronics retailer, has a “black tag” event claiming savings of up to 50 percent.
On the rue Vieille du Temple in the Marais district of central Paris, nearly every boutique within a one-block stretch is plastered with signs promoting “Black Friday” in English. While France has been slower than other European countries to join the trend, retailers forecast 6 billion euros in sales this year around the event.
In some cases, something is lost in translation. In Germany, the “Friday” is often dropped in signs promoting a “Black Sale” or “Black Week.”
But a backlash has been gaining steam. In France, lawmakers this week moved to crack down on the sales with a proposal to ban some Black Friday promotions starting next year, citing misleading pricing tactics and the rising environmental cost from the delivery of millions of packages.
Élisabeth Borne, the French environment minister, warned of “a frenzy of consumption” in which people are encouraged to buy products they don’t need.
“We need to consume better, not more,” she added.
Parisian authorities also asked the government to allow cities to slap a so-called eco-tax on Amazon and other delivery platforms to make e-commerce players pay for pollution and rising delivery traffic.
“Black Friday gives us an overview of what to expect,” Jean-Louis Missika, the deputy mayor of Paris, wrote in an open letter Monday to the French daily Le Monde. “2.5 million deliveries are expected, 10 times more than the number of packages delivered daily the rest of the year in Paris.”
Protesters from the Extinction Rebellion movement plan “Block Friday” demonstrations in cities throughout France on Friday.
If you live outside the Czech Republic, you’ve probably never heard of the search engine Seznam. But for many Czechs, as the company likes to say, “Seznam.cz is synonymous with the internet.”
Seznam is an internet search company whose algorithms are built on the Czech language. It launched in 1996 in Prague, with about 50,000 Czech koruna (about $2,200) in funding. Early versions of Seznam.cz displayed a list of popular Czech sites—seznam means “list” in Czech—as well as a summary of Czech news.
That was two years before Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google in Palo Alto. As Google gobbled up most of the global search market over the next decade, Seznam’s unique Czech identity made it the rare local player that held its ground in search. Seznam also expanded into other free services like maps, email, and price comparison.
By 2008, Google dominated the market for general internet search in 30 of the 31 European Economic Area (EEA) countries. The exception was the Czech Republic.
But sometime in the past decade, Google came for Seznam too. The EU believes Google overtook its Czech competitor around 2011. Data from ad marketing agency eVisions shows Seznam still held a majority share of the Czech search market at the start of 2014, but that Google pulled ahead in the second half of that year. The latest data from eVisions put Google’s share of search on the Czech internet at 74% as of the end of 2018, nearly three times Seznam’s 26% share. Google’s share of mobile search was even higher, at 81%.
The defeat of Seznam on its home turf demonstrates just how difficult it is to compete with Google in its core business of search. Former Seznam CEO Michal Feix, who now consults for the company, says that Seznam first noticed Google gaining rapidly around 2010, as search traffic shifted from desktop to mobile. The change was particularly notable at the Christmas holidays, he said, as consumers unwrapped new Android mobile devices that came pre-loaded with Google search apps.
“That was the moment when these people changed their habits and transferred from desktop to a mobile device where the Google services were preinstalled,” Feix said. “It was much more complicated to go to anything else like Seznam, and these users started to simply disappear from our radar.”
Google owns the Android mobile operating system that the majority of smartphones run on globally. Android software is open source, meaning anyone can modify it, but in practice Google has barred device makers from crucial Google apps, like the Play Store, if they developed or sold a device running on a version of Android not approved by Google, known as a “fork.”
Google has also required Android device makers to preinstall its search app and Chrome browser to license the Play Store. In July 2018, the European Commission fined Google a record €4.3 billion ($4.7 billion) for Android practices it deemed illegal and harmful to competition.
From 2008 to 2014, Seznam sought to preinstall its search app on Android devices that it hoped to sell in the Czech Republic. Seznam later told the European Commission (pdf) that “all our efforts generally grind to a halt with the oral off-the-record statement: ‘we are unable to change mobile phone firmware for licensing and financial reasons.'” In June 2013, Seznam filed a complaint with the EU over Google’s Android practices. A few years later, it joined a similar complaint lodged by lobbying group FairSearch.
How Google stays on top
Google spends heavily to maintain its dominance in search. Last year, Google parent Alphabet spent $12.6 billion, or 13% of its revenue from search and other Google properties like Gmail and YouTube, on traffic acquisition costs paid to “distribution partners” who make Google search and services available. Such partners include mobile carriers, software developers, and device manufacturers. Goldman Sachs estimates Google paid Apple $9.4 billion in 2018 to be the default search engine on the iPhone, and could pay it as much as $12.2 billion this year.
Marc Al-Hames, managing director of Cliqz, a privacy-focused browser and search engine based in Munich with a couple hundred thousand monthly active users, says he likes to ask politicians why a company with a good product and near-total market share spends so much money on distribution partners. “It cannot be to grow, because they have the market,” he said of Google. “It can only be to shut it down to everyone else.”
Google didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
Berlin-based Ecosia is also trying to carve out space against Google. Christian Kroll founded the search company in 2009 to fight deforestation. A certified B Corp, Ecosia donates up to 80% of profit from search ads to partners that plant trees in high-need areas. It takes about 45 searches, or 25 cents, to plant the average tree, Kroll says. The company has more than 8 million active users and has planted more than 75 million trees to date, according to a running count on ecosia.org. Ecosia normally sees around 25,000 installs per day, but that spiked to over 250,000 in August as fires raged in the Amazon.
Ecosia is built on top of Microsoft search engine Bing. The company has approached Google “various times” about working together. “They say that they can’t work with a company like us because they claim that Ecosia users would click on advertisements more often than normal users and that would harm the advertiser,” Kroll said, adding that Ecosia has data to disprove this. The goal is to plant 1 trillion trees, something Kroll says Ecosia could achieve in 20 years if it were as big as Google. “If Google tomorrow would copy our model, then I would be super happy,” he said.
Google
Google’s proposed Android choice screen
Along with the European Commission’s multibillion-euro fine last year, it ordered Google to cease illegal practices but left the manner of compliance up to the company. In August, Google announced it would implement a search “choice screen” with four slots—one reserved for Google—for new Android phones and tablets shipped in the EEA starting from March 2020.
To pick the three outside search providers to appear on the screen, Google asked companies to submit the amount they would be willing to pay Google each time a user selected their service. Google said slots would go to the three highest bidders, who would pay the amount of the fourth-highest bidder.
Google asked search providers to submit bids by Nov. 15 and said it would share the results of the auction the following week. Kroll told Quartz in early November that Ecosia was boycotting the process, “because fair competition shouldn’t be for auction.” Al-Hames of Cliqz said he couldn’t share details of the auction because of a nondisclosure agreement Google attached to it, but added that he didn’t think “any reasonable search engine should endorse their wrong doing by participating.”
The week bids were due, Feix was still wrestling with whether Seznam should take part. “I call it a pay-for-play,” he said, “because it means you have to pay a dominant player for a chance to compete.”
You've polished off your pumpkin pie and the fights with your relatives are fading into memory. It can only mean one thing: Black Friday is well and truly here. There are deals aplenty live right now from major stores such as Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy and others. We've spent the past several weeks prepping, and the past few days collating, and you can see the result of our work below: Dozens of stories focusing on the best Black Friday deals at all major retailers,
Here's the ultimate sales guide to keep your head from spinning (and your budget on track) this holiday shopping season. And of course, the Cheapskate's top Black Friday picks.
Best Buy: Wednesday, Nov. 27 at 9:01 p.m. PT (Thursday, Nov. 28 at 12:01 a.m. ET)
Target: Sales started Wednesday, Nov. 27, but timing is complicated According to Target: "On Nov. 27, early access deals begin at approximately 2:01 a.m. CT (12:01 a.m. PT, 3 a.m. ET) for credit and debit RedCard holders and 6 p.m. CT (4 p.m. PT, 7 p.m. ET) for Target Circle members. RedCard early access price applied when you use your RedCard at checkout on Target.com. Target Circle early access price applied when you sign into your Target.com account at checkout on Target.com after 6 p.m. CT. Target Circle and RedCard Black Friday early access offers are not the same, and all deals will be revealed on Nov. 27."
Now playing:Watch this:
How to get great deals on Black Friday
Black Friday is mere hours away. But you don't need to sit around waiting until you've finished all of your delicious Thanksgiving turkey and pumpkin pie to get the best savings, there are already plenty of sale priceslive right now from major stores like Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy and others, with the "official" Black Friday discounts and sales due to launch tomorrow.
Here's the ultimate sales guide to keep your head from spinning (and your budget on track) this holiday shopping season.
Target: Sales start Wednesday, Nov. 27, but timing is complicated According to Target: "On Nov. 27, early access deals begin at approximately 2:01 a.m. CT (12:01 a.m. PT, 3 a.m. ET) for credit and debit RedCard holders and 6 p.m. CT (4 p.m. PT, 7 p.m. ET) for Target Circle members. RedCard early access price applied when you use your RedCard at checkout on Target.com. Target Circle early access price applied when you sign into your Target.com account at checkout on Target.com after 6 p.m. CT. Target Circle and RedCard Black Friday early access offers are not the same, and all deals will be revealed on Nov. 27."
Black Friday is tantalizingly close. But you don't need to wait until you've finished your Thanksgiving turkey to get the best deals, there are already plenty of sale priceslive right now from retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy and others, with the "official" Black Friday discounts and sales due to launch tomorrow.
Here's the ultimate sales guide to keep your head from spinning (and your budget on track) this holiday shopping season.
Target: Sales start Wednesday, Nov. 27, but timing is complicated According to Target: "On Nov. 27, early access deals begin at approximately 2:01 a.m. CT (12:01 a.m. PT, 3 a.m. ET) for credit and debit RedCard holders and 6 p.m. CT (4 p.m. PT, 7 p.m. ET) for Target Circle members. RedCard early access price applied when you use your RedCard at checkout on Target.com. Target Circle early access price applied when you sign into your Target.com account at checkout on Target.com after 6 p.m. CT. Target Circle and RedCard Black Friday early access offers are not the same, and all deals will be revealed on Nov. 27."
