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Intro Randy and Christa chime in with some stats and thoughts as we approach the Black Friday Season. Announcements (And Lots of Show Notes!) Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, which means that Thanksgiving is on Thursday. Do not forget that, you turkeys. I did not know this, but the term Black Friday is used because, since the early 1950’s, when sales on items would be so big, stores would tip into “The black”. As retailers continued to grow, they pushed Black Friday openings to earlier and earlier times…many stores promoting the idea of opening at 8pm on Black Thursday..but those sales tactics didn’t work. Then, of course, you have the door buster deals. I think most people understand how that works, and that’s when a store has a EXTREMELY limited stock on some goodies they’ll hand you at the door. It’s clever, but it’s not always likely that you’ll get a free LCD monitor. Looking back to last year, Walmart was offering “Light up Black Friday” party with free coffee and cookies. Try harder, Walmart. As a tech guy, you’ll generally see this deal often, and that’s where $100 is slashed off the price of many Laptop brands. Retailers are going to have to be a little more creative to stay alive in this market. It’s not necessarily that the Holidays are the best time to buy. Things such as Winter clothing and fitness equipment is almost always less expensive in late winter and, according to Business Insider, fitness deals peak in January. That does seem to make sense, because I know it’s easy to predict that every year we’ll see the Fitness Clubs posting their New Year Resolution commercials to get people in the gym. Deals: By Keyboard Or, you can avoid stepping foot in a store altogether. You can stay safe off the roads while others are rushing to the store. I have this theory that online retailers like to space out their extreme web server traffic. Think about it, even Amazon’s site can crawl on “Prime Day” – if you remember the terrible website issues they had in 2018, when many saw a “Sorry” message with a photo of a dog, rather than the product they wanted to snag a deal on. More of the same as last year Google trying hard to sell Google Home, Amazon with Echos Google’s Home products can answer more complex questions, Alexa still hears better, in my opinion, and I still think that the Echo Plus is a great device and I’m happy I bought it for the ZigBee Radio abilities. Deals on the Google Pixel 4 – Don’t buy it. It snaps like a twig. Don’t buy Google Stadia – Let it die. Gaming does need to pass any more control to the cloud. How would you like there to be a real remote shut-off switch for all of your shit? – well, Stadia is a great start. PC Gamer’s website does bring up a good point, though, and that is that “No one wants to be the Blockbuster to someone else’s Netflix”. Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/what-happens-if-stadia-wins/ Use a computer. I don’t care how fast and efficient you are with a smartphone. I could have my 89-year old grandfather sign in on a laptop and whoop a mobile phone deal-seeker’s ass. Even better, for you multi-monitor users out there, have your deals on different screens, compare them, and defeat. Sites that can save you time Brad’s Deals – Ben’s Bargains has a team of deal seekers, even providing a paragraph Bio for each of them on the site. Probably the most-popular, boasting numbers of 10 Million Monthly users, with 80% returning visits and 15 Million app installs. They’re hiring in California and Nevada. The cool thing about Slick Deals is that the deals are “Rated and Reviewed by the community”. For the totally-obsessed, Slick deals even has a Live Feed view (in beta). It basically looks like a twitter live tweet screen for deals. So if you’re insane, definitely check that out. It’s at Slickdeals.net/live.