LIFE

Black Friday tips and tricks for all types of shoppers

Abbey Roy

Happy Thanksgiving, dearest readers, from the Bargain Advocate!

I wish you and yours a holiday full, primarily, of thankfulness.

...but if you must have other things, feel free to read on.

Here’s the scoop. When there was only one Black Friday — you know, on Friday — there were two basic types of Black Friday shoppers: Casual and hard-core.

Casual being the type who venture out at a decent hour of the morning to scope out deals after the thundering herds have snapped up the doorbusters and gone home to sleep for the first time in two days; hard-core being the type who comprise the thundering herds.

But now Black Friday isn’t a day. It’s a week or more, depending upon how you feel about shopping online; if you count the hype surrounding “Black Friday ad leaks,” we could probably say it lasts about a month.

Because of this, there are numerous types of Black Friday shoppers, whom I will attempt to briefly assist in the paragraphs that follow.

No matter which type you are, remember to use technology to your advantage to help with researching products, checking reviews and tracking Black Friday websites to compare deals (dealnews.com, blackfriday.com and theblackfriday.com are among them).

If you have a store or two picked out beforehand, be sure to check if your friendly local grocer is offering a fuel points promotion for gift cards (as Kroger does in our area). If you’re going to spend $100 on doorbuster Christmas socks at JCPenney, you might as well purchase a gift card before you head out and get free gas for it.

(Incidentally, a WalletHub study of 2015 Black Friday ads determined JCPenney will offer the deepest discounts this year, with an overall discount rate of 68 percent; Kohl’s comes in second at 67 percent.)

Ready to get started? Here are a few additional tips.

1. The pre-Black Friday shopper. Have you heard? Stores are opening their doors (or e-doors) earlier these days. As in, before Friday.

In some cases, waaaay before.

If it’s Thanksgiving Day and you’ve finished roasting chestnuts over an open fire and passed around the coffee and the pumpkin pie and still have extra time on your hands, you can be sure Best Buy, Walmart, Target, Toys ’r’ Us and Kohl’s (among many others) would love to be graced with your presence — and life savings.

If you have your sights set on Turkey Day doorbusters and deals (in-store and online), be sure that you’ve researched the products beforehand. Paying $150 for 50-inch TV is great (here’s looking at you, Amazon), unless said TV only lasts for a month. If you’re unfamiliar with the brand and no reviews are available, proceed with caution.

Be sure to bring along your smartphone (armed with useful apps like ShopSavvy) for the sake of price comparison on the go. It would be a bummer to win a scuffling match to pay $39.99 for a My Size Barbie and then find out you could have gotten the same one for $39.97 elsewhere.

It does beg the question: Was that black eye really worth it?

2. The online Black Friday shopper. Let’s face it: Spending an entire day cooking, eating, washing dishes, eating, watching TV, eating, maybe taking a walk to take the edge off FitBit-induced guilt, eating and then sleeping can really sap one’s energy.

If you find the idea of waking at any hour of the morning the day after such a huge expense of energy sort of appalling, drag yourself to the nearest laptop and hunt for deals in your pajamas.

Just a few tips: Make sure you take advantage of free shipping, and before you finalize your purchase, stop by retailmenot.com to double-check promo codes and coupons to see if you can score any additional discounts.

Cyber-safety is always a concern, so as you’re checking out, be sure the URL in your browser begins with “https” — “s” means secure.

Also familiarize yourself with return policies, including return shipping. If free shipping is only one-way, you’d better be pleased with your purchase, or the great deal might not be so great after all.

If you’re super-serious about savings, check out cash-back sites like shopathome.com, which offer a certain percentage of cash back for online purchases.

3. The morning-of Black Friday shopper. This is the closest thing that remains of the Black Friday Shoppers of Yore, die-hard deal hunters who spent the entirety of Thanksgiving Day poring over ad stacks weighing more than their 30-pound turkey and plotting which stores to arrive at when, elbowing their way through the crowd to their prized (insert Fad Toy of the Year here) and maybe getting into a scuffle over the last one. (Others of this breed have moved to the Thanksgiving Day brick-and-mortar shoppers of Item No. 1.)

Clearly they have the Internet working to their advantage these days, though nothing beats the feeling of riffling through those colorful pages that still smell slightly of newsprint. Aaaah.

Because of Thanksgiving Day sales, many stores have opted to open at normalish hours instead of pulling all-nighters: Best Buy and Target, for example, open at 8 a.m. on Black Friday. Plenty of time for pancakes and coffee beforehand.

My two pieces of advice for you, Purist Black Friday shoppers, are this: First, have fun. This day, debatably, comes but once a year.

Secondly, if you see a great deal, be sure that it’s actually a great deal. According to research by software company Adobe, electronics, toys, jewelry and apparel can actually be found for better prices other days of the year (including, yes, Thanksgiving).

4. The “Oh-hey-it’s-Friday-afternoon-let’s-see-what’s-left” shopper. I have been to Walmart the day after Black Friday carnage and was surprised to see it looked not much different from Walmart on any other day of the week — except, perhaps, less busy.

So beware: There might not actually be any deals left.

Last year I wrote about lesser-known places to get Black Friday deals, like drugstores. If you’re not in the market for an HDTV but could really use some mascara, this might be a wise way to spend your Friday afternoon.

5. The Anti-Black Friday non-shopper. Enjoy your Thanksgiving and please eat an extra piece of pie for me. That is all.

If you have insight about a frugal living topic or an idea for a future column, please email me at amroy@nncogannett.com. I’d love to hear from you!

Happy saving,

Abbey