Are there any good Black Friday deals this year?

I work for an online business. Its very small but the owner tries to run it like a Fortune500 company. They're all about SEO and attend all kinds of seminars with words like Synergistic and 'metrics that mater' etc. They've spent the past month upping all our prices by 30% so we can offer a 20% discount and still make more than normal. Its shitty and I'm not a fan, but this seems to be the norm lately. That, or just offering worse quality in general. Ive avoided black Friday deals for a while now.

Also very illegal in some places.
One thing I do to combat this is I make a list of stuff I'd like to buy at a discount in early summer and keep up with the prices every two weeks or so until black Friday. This helps me know if a discount is real or not. I even made a power automate script to check the prices for me
- If you shop from Amazon: camelcamelcamel.com
The big box store my dad worked at in the 80’s did this. They’d all have to stay late the night before raising the prices of many items, so that when they went on “sale”, they still were making money.
I booked a cruise about 3 or 4 days prior to Black Friday, now when I look at their website they are claiming that they have Black Friday deals going on. when I looked into it The price is actually increased by about 30% from when I booked.
Check geizhals.de, skinflint.co.uk or other sites that track prices to not fall for this.

Since this is a global forum, you will get plenty of irrelevant suggestions.

But sure, I'll bite:

Sony WH-1000XM4 for 2290 SEK at Komplett, Webhallen, Net On Net, Power, Elgiganten and Dustin.

Jabra Elite 7 Pro for 1290 SEK at Inet, Kjell, Komplett, Net On Net, Power and Elgiganten.

Bose QC SE for 1990 SEK at Net On Net, Komplett and Elgiganten.

Hestra gloves seem to have a good discount on pricerunner / prisjakt.nu
- I can also vouch for the quallity of Hestra gloves, their moose skin leather gloves are excellent
I don't know whether that's a good price in SEK for the Jabra headphones. I have the Elite active 7s (sport edition) and am very happy with them.
- It is a good price for them, not amazing, but a good price, accoring to Prisjakt's history graph it is the lowest by 200sek they have been on sale for since they launched.

Every black Friday is when you spend like $9 at Walmart so you can replace your old Tupperware with new Tupperware.

Also, roombas can usually be had for cheap. Roomba had the patent for two brush rollers (not some brushes. Rollers) and having dual allowed roomba to clean a lot better than any other bots while not needing a bunch of suction power or other pricey stuff. About a year ago their patent time finally ran out. There's been a couple other bots that have gotten dual rollers since then, but right now it's mostly still roomba, so that's what I recommend if you want to spend under $300 and have a Bot that picks up well. Replacement parts for roombas are also plentiful and often pretty cheap.

Are you me? This is my plan yearly.
- Do you have to replace it yearly?

Think yubico is having a ~~buy 1 get 1 free~~ deal for their yubikeys this cyberweek

Edit: its a buy 1 get 1 50% off deal

Protonmail has good Black Friday deals of you want to de-Google a bit. FoundryVTT also does a good Black Friday deal if you're looking for a virtual tabletop for D&D or whatever other TTRPG you want to play.

France https://www.dealabs.com/

Every year Hulu offers 12 months for $12

Always hard to pass that one up.

It's add supported Hulu. I'm not going to pay AND watch commercials. Even if it's only a dollar a month, it seems dumb they wouldn't just give you the damned service.
- I had that plan last year and between the pihole I run on my network and ublock origin in my browser I maybe only saw two or three ads.
Use that money for a vpn and torrent everything
- Oh trust me, I'm slowly working up my collection but the storage cost alone is more than that
- What VPN offers 12 months for $12 and is there a catch? I'm happy with Proton but having something cheap and trustworthy to recommend would be nice.

Makeship is having a sale on their new Glow in the Dark plushies. It's not a huge discount, but the proceeds go towards supporting independent artists which is always a good thing.

https://www.makeship.com/shop/gitd-2023

If you're into the smart lighting thing, depending on what you're looking for Philips hue has some decent deals on same lights and accessories.

Of note here is that Phillips hue now force an account to use their lightbulbs, which means they aren't really "standalone" anymore. They now force data sharing and may remove non cloud use in the future.

If you prefer to use a local home automation option like home assistant or hubitat, Phillips bulbs just got way worse.
- I thought the bulbs still function as stand alone ZigBee devices to use with a bridge of your choice

I can't really speak for your area, but there aren't many things going on where I am in terms of Black Friday, not like last year and the year before. The closest thing to a constant throughout the years is that one humorist (run between family members) at the store every Black Friday with the charity stall that sells coal lumps; arguably not store-appropriate, but it fills in vacant areas and has a visual niceness effect.

Barnes and noble has a pretty good deal on their exclusive hard covers. Buy one get one 50% off

I was just looking at that today. Costco deals look like real deals. Zenni optical might have some stuff. Target has their “40% off some lego sets” again.

https://us.lskd.co/ has some pretty steep drops on activewear and they're pretty good quality

https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2023/11/the-best-sports-tech-fitness-deals-black-friday.html DC Rainmaker keeps a pretty good list of sports tech deals. This guy has been the go-to reviewer of this stuff for several years and definitely knows what he's talking about.

https://www.moosejaw.com/content/p-Thanksgiving-sale Moosejaw always does a pretty good sale around this time of year. (they're a lot like REI and offer extremely easy free returns)

https://www.lodgecastiron.com/shop?Sale=All Sale Items&page=1 Oh, and Lodge cast iron is running a sale. They seem to only discount their most popular products once or twice a year so this is a good time to grab a few items

I'd buy a standing desk

This year's gonna be good for me because of the omnibus directive

What is the omnibus directive?
- When a shop in Poland (or another EU country) claims to have reduced prices on something, they have to put up the lowest price from the last 30 days next to it. So it often turns out that the prices have not, in fact, been lowered.