Woe betide the Black Friday bargain hunter; where once there were stellar deals on giant televisions and hard disk drives now there are slight discounts on underwear and handbags. Sears' ad for this year has been unearthed and, while it naturally has an eclectic selection of goodies on sale ranging from power tools to KitchenAid mixers (and that's just on the front page), from a gadgety perspective we're not finding anything quite worth lining up at 3:00am in November for. There's a 40-inch Samsung 1080p LCD for $599, about $50 cheaper than we can find it for online, and a similar Sony model for $664 -- a whole $10 less than Amazon is asking for a comparable model with free shipping and no uncomfortable small talk with other half-frozen shopaholics. A raft of cheap but mediocre games and movies will be available, some
soon to be obsolete GPS devices, and lots of other random things stuffed into the PDF scan linked below. Not into the whole hunting for deals thing? The other link has everything listed out, making for easy text searching -- and for guilt-free snoozing the day after Turkey Day.
Read - PDF scan of Sears 2009 Black Friday ad
Read - Listing of Sears 2009 Black Friday deals
posted Oct 30th 2009 8:34AM
I'm waiting on Sears to follow Circuit into oblivion.
I used to think the same way as you until I bought a house 4 months ago. Sears has been great.
To Upthewazzu, I'm sure you could have gotten much better deals on your appliances at Lowe's, or Home Depot than you got at Sears. Like BarkingGhost said, I can't wait till Sears follows CC into the shitter. They really are a horrible company.
Actually, Lowes and Home Depot are both horrible, horrible places to buy major appliances. Their delivery staff are a bunch of jokers who are literally the kings of scratch and dent. I made the mistake of buying a hot water heater from Lowes and a washer dryer set from Home depot last year, all to save about a hundred dollars versus buying them at Sears. The water heater was dropped from the truck during delivery, but the guy promised there was no damage done because there were no physical scratches or dents to the casing, so he went ahead and installed it. Turns out, gas hot water heaters have a ceramic tube the runs up inside them, which are easily shattered by strong shocks or jolts, which the guy later admitted to being aware of. When the thing didn't work after being installed, it took a weeks worth of phone calls and an intervention from the regional manager to get the GM of the store I purchased it from to apologize, in person, and refund our money completely.
As bad as that was, what happened with the washer dryer from home depot made that look like a picnic. While the guys who delivered and installed them seemed nice enough, two days after they were hooked up, they almost burned my house down. After putting out the fire that started behind the dryer, and was on its way up to the ceiling of the laundry room, I found that the dryer power cord was attached so half assed that it was grounding out on the casing of the dryer itself, which caused enough of an arc to ignite the lint coming out of the back of the dryer, as it was never attached to the outside vent. As for the washer, while it was hooked up, the water hoses were never tightened down, and were leaking just enough to cause significant water damage within months, if the fire hadn't made me take a closer look. In this case, even the regional manager hung up the phone on me, and it took 6 months and small claims court to get my money back for the units and to cover the cost of repairing the damage to my home. Even with all that, I consider myself lucky, because if my wife had touched the metal casing instead of the plastic bits when loading the dryer, she most likely would have been electrocuted.
So there you go... all that just to save a couple hundred bucks. Consumerist and Consumer Reports websites are both filled with stories just like mine. Sears, on the other hand, has been a CR best buy retailer for decades because of their customer service, and the Kenmore brand they sell is routinely in their top picks. I have been a fan of Sears since I was 4 years old, thanks to their Christmas Wishbook, but it wasn't until I became a home owner that I really started to appreciate them.
I don't think Sears has had a better deal or price on anything I've wanted to buy in the last 10 years.
You wish a trip to the cleaners, head to Sears
Sears is where I got my 42" 1080p panny plasma for $800 total in 2007
(I worked in the Sears electronics dept from Oct 2007-Dec 2007). I know the deal you are talking about actually. I LOVED selling those 42" 1080p models, because we got a buttload of commission on them. It made it such an easy sell when people found out they got 10% off by using their Sears card, and then I think there was another 10% off if they bought it on our Friends & Family night, but I can't remember.