BLACK FRIDAY, FAKE OR TREAT?

BLACK FRIDAY, FAKE OR TREAT?
A GUIDEPOST Report

This probably won’t come as a surprise to the great majority of consumers but prices do go up on Black Friday week. The Organización de Usuarios y Consumidores (OCU), Spain’s largest private non-profit consumer organization, warned that instead of getting great pre-Christmas deals, you could end up getting fooled. Not only that prices of given items don’t go down as publicized but that prices are marked up more than 2.6% on average.

Of the 2,500 products that OCU monitored on Black Friday week, only 19% had their prices down. The prices of 27% of the other products rose. The prices of the rest were unchanged.

The appliances stores Millar (88%), Tien 21(86%), and Navarrete (74%)  were Black Friday week’s best performers; more than 75% of the goods that OCU has been tracking have their prices go down in these places, albeit the average discount was only 6% off the regular prices.

Other stores on the OCU radar that offered real discounts were Amazon, MiElectro, El Corte Ingles, and Electroprecio.

On the opposite side are the stores where more than half of the merchandise were more expensive during the Black Friday week than in the previous weeks.

One of the most notorious Black Friday practices is the deliberate inflation of prices before Black Friday and then claim to sell at succulent discounts during the Black Friday week. A popular multinational chain of stores selling consumer electronics has been caught in the act.

Think about all this when you go shopping on Cyber Monday!

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Images
Featured image montage: Arrow/Open Clipart-Vectors from Pixabay. Euro coin/Gerd Altman from Pixabay. (Text supplied)
El  Crte Inglés/Raul Hernandez Gonzalez, CC BY2.0