Black Friday has lost its luster—at least for some shoppers who have discovered some deals aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
This week, a TikTok video appeared to show that Fortune 500 home improvement retailer Home Depot allegedly masked original prices on items with a “Black Friday deal” of the exact same price. The video went viral with more than half-a-million views. It shows a customer removing the “holiday sale” price sticker on a high-pressure inflator listed at $24.97, revealing the same original price underneath.
Home Depot did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment about the allegations or whether the company falsely advertises Black Friday sales. If true, however, retail experts say this could potentially be considered false advertising, and would be a bad choice for retailers now—especially as shrinkflation and other pricing tactics have sown distrust among customers.
“Leading retailers invest heavily in their customer relationships and trust is a major component of this,” Matt Voda, CEO of marketing software company OptiMine, told Fortune. “Trust is difficult and slow to build, but lost very easily and quickly with such practices.”
This isn’t the first instance that has prompted consumers to question the veracity of Black Friday deals.
“Even before inflation I’ve been to a few Black Friday shopping [events] and the first thing I noticed is nothing is on sale, the prices look the same,” one viewer commented on another viral TikTok video showing similar alleged pricing practices. Target was also called out in 2023 in a video allegedly revealing a television set that was ticketed with a sale price of $649.99 while also displaying the same price on a tag underneath.
“All kinds of pricing shenanigans have been going on for decades,” Luke Kachersky, an associate professor of marketing at the Fordham Gabelli School of Business, told Fortune. “For example, retailers displaying things like, ‘regularly $X, now $Y,’ even though it’s hard to imagine the retailer ever having really offered the item—or anyone ever buying it—at the ‘regular’ price.”
A Target spokesperson told The New York Post at the time, though, that the TVs “were on sale before Black Friday as part of our early Black Friday sales.”
To be sure, Kachersky said it’s notoriously difficult to prove false advertising.
“Sure the price is the same, but the retailer could simply argue they re-labeled [or] re-named their existing prices for the season,” Kachersky said. “But while that kind of argument might work for a retailer in a legal sense, it fails common sense. Consumers are definitely going to feel lied to.”
Black Friday isn’t what it used to be
Whether being accused of making fake price reductions or not, it’s not just in your head: Many retailers don’t offer deals nearly as good as they once were, retail experts said.
“In most cases, the ‘doorbuster’ deals of yesteryear no longer exist and the pricing discounts have gotten smaller and more intelligent,” Voda said. That’s thanks to advanced analytics that allow retailers to see the “sweet spot” between demand generation and profit assurance, he said, which informs them on key moments to drop prices throughout the year.
Budgeting and personal finance expert Andrea Woroch also told Fortune the difference between today’s Black Friday deals and Black Friday a decade ago is consumers don’t see as wide of a selection of discounts. While she said she’s seen some “good markdowns” on select items like 52% off a Nespresso maker at Bloomingdales and 50% off Beats wireless headphones at Target, not everything that’s advertised as being on a Black Friday sale is actually a good deal.
“You just have to be mindful that not everything is a good deal and not to get caught up in the buying frenzy that these sales events create,” Woroch said. “Have your list, do your research, compare prices, look for extra savings by stacking coupon codes and track price drops.”
