How to Shop Smart on Black Friday (and Cyber Monday)<br />“While everything you see offline will be available online, it can be a lot more difficult to get<br />one of the truly rare deals online than if you’re first in line and guaranteed to get it.”<br />“The only place you should line up on Thanksgiving afternoon is on the line of scrimmage for a family football game,” Mr. McAllister said.<br />While it doesn’t find discounts for you or make sure you’re getting the best price, it does go<br />that extra mile to save you a little cash before you click “purchase.”<br />The downside to tools like these is that they require extensive information about where you’re shopping and what you’re buying in order to work.<br />Most people, myself included, tend to procrastinate on this,<br />but if you have a good sense of the things you want to buy for the holidays, Black Friday is a great chance to knock them out early while saving money,” said Shep McAllister, editor of Kinja Deals, a site that also tracks deals around the web.<br />For others, shopping at home — or not at all, as in the Buy Nothing Day campaign — is a pleasant alternative to<br />encouraging stores to force retail workers to work on Black Friday or even as early as Thanksgiving afternoon.<br />“Last year, we saw a decent amount of products drop to their Black Friday prices a couple weeks ahead<br />of time, so you can save yourself a lot of hassle if you start watching deals early,” he said.<br />“Last year, we saw a tremendous growth in retailers starting their deals Thursday — as in, we posted<br />almost as many deals Thursday as we did Friday, and a similar amount on Monday,” he said.
