Early sale Oct. 19-22, new guarantee
Expect Best Buy’s Black Friday sales to start early again this year.
The retailer will kick off the holiday season with a four-day sale starting Tuesday and then will start its Black Friday sale on Nov. 19 – a week earlier than Black Friday proper. The deals in the Oct. 19 sale will also be covered by a “Black Friday Price Guarantee” if the prices go lower.
Best Buy CEO Corie Barry announced the holiday plans Thursday on NBC’s Today Show.
“We’re heading into the most competitive part of the year. Everybody wants to have that perfect gift for their customers,” Barry said. “And what we’re seeing is we’re going to continue to be priced incredibly competitively. We don’t see prices going up markedly unexpectedly from here and in fact if anything there’s going to be great deals.”
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Best Buy said one of its “hottest deals” is a 70-inch Samsung 4K Smart TV for $599, a savings of $150. Last year, the retailer sold a 70-inch Samsung TV for $529.99. There also will be Chromebooks as low as $99.
The Minneapolis-based electronics retailer is one of the first companies to announce 2021 holiday plans. Sam’s Club announced it was doubling the number of savings events it holds and Amazon started an early sale.
Last year, Best Buy unveiled its first Black Friday deals on Oct. 8, days ahead of its competing Amazon Prime Day sale.
Experts recommend that consumers start shopping for holiday gifts now ahead of Thanksgiving and Black Friday, which is often seen as the official kickoff to the holiday shopping season.
“Shoppers are planning to spend more money for the holidays than they did last year,” Kristin McGrath, a shopping expert and editor at deal website RetailMeNot, told USA TODAY. “This increased demand is all going to be on top of the shipping delays, staffing challenges and supply chain issues that are dogging retailers this year.”
The White House announced Wednesday that Walmart, FedEx and UPS will expand their efforts in order to help with the ongoing supply chain bottlenecks and shortages caused by the pandemic.
“We’re actually in a relatively good inventory position,” Barry said during the NBC interview. “But broadly, we are going into the holiday with 20% more inventory than we had two years ago and 50% more than last year.”
Early Black Friday sale: Oct. 19-22
Best Buy says it’s “thrown out the old holiday calendar and created a whole new one to help you score the hottest tech at the best deals.” Days highlighted on its calendar include Nov. 1, which it says “Black Friday Prices Guaranteed.”
During the four-day early sale, Best Buy said in a news release that it’ll have “hundreds of our Black Friday deals available on the season’s hottest tech, including everything from headphones to laptops and more.”
Member Monday special deals
Members of the Best Buy Totaltech program, which costs $199.99 a year, and the free My Best Buy loyalty program, get access to “special deals on most Mondays throughout the…
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