Stay In Bed: Black Friday May Not Be The Best Time To Buy That TV You Want

As we mentioned last week, just because retailers are offering deep discounts on some electronics doesn’t mean there will be savings on the particular item you’re after. Now there is some science to back that up.

Our pals at Consumer Reports commissioned a study of prices from mid-November to mid-December of 2010 for electronics products that the magazine had rated as recommended.

And according to the data, many times the lowest prices of the season on those items were not on Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

Explains CR:

Specifically, more than a quarter of the recommended TVs and cameras were at least 5 per cent cheaper between Cyber Monday and December 13 than they were earlier, including during the Black Friday weekend. With laptops, we provided Decide.com with a smaller sample of models, but the resulting data indicated that consumers would have been at least as likely as with TVs and cameras to save on recommended models by waiting.

Consumer Reports notes that you’ll definitely find some rock-bottom prices on Black Friday, but they are likely to be on items that the magazine has either not recommended or even reviewed.

“One thing I’ve noticed is that many of the lowest prices this year are on secondary and tertiary brands such as Element, Sansui, Seiki, and Dynex, that we don’t typically cover,” says CR reporter Jim Willcox.

Black Friday prices not always lowest for our recommended models [Consumer Reports]

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