What the title says. Every year I hear everyone at work go buzzing about Prime Day, and then when I’d go check what items were on sale they were mostly cheap gaff and a bunch of minimally discounted tech products. Am I missing something that’s optimal to get around this time of year?
I got the best deal of all: canceling my Prime membership. I’m saving tons of money! 🤡
(but seriously, screw Amazon and their monopolistic, anti-labor practices)
fun fact, the term “monopolistic” refers to a specific, relatively competitive type of imperfect competition, and not to monopoly competition. You’re thinking of monopoloid practices, or in the case of their labor practices, oligopsonistic (having only a few buyers and many sellers).
Yeah, that. 😅
Ive been needing to restock some home stuff, water filters, air filters, etc. Then a few things we’ve had on the list to buy, but just hadn’t gotten around to it, new dish drying rack, raised garden bed. I checked camelcamelcamel as well.
Oh and something completely frivolous, I got the latest Kindle Paperwhite, cause it’s waterproof and USB C. I traded in my older kindle for 25$. Now I can finally stop carrying that micro USB cable when I travel.
This was such a useful suggestion, just got a bunch of replacement water filters for my fridge.
If you already had something in mind to get, and you check the price (camelcamelcamel.com is a great resource for Amazon price tracking) and it’s on sale, that’s optimal. Other than that, it’s usually Amazon devices and other Amazon products that have the best deals (Fire TV, Kindle, Echo, etc.)
There might be some good deals, but since it’d involve shopping at Bezos’, I’d try to avoid it nonetheless
Not so much. I use it as an occasion to look through my wishlist to see if there are any legitimate discounts on quality goods from actual brands, and I’ve rarely seen anything. As far as I can tell, it’s generally fictional discounts on bootleg junk sold by made-up Chinese brands like BANGOOSMILE.
I even popped a few things into camelcamelcamel and on many of them you could see how something was selling for $30 for months, then the day before Prime Day, they bumped the price up to the fictional MSRP for a minimal amount of time so they could claim it was on “sale” for like 66% off or some nonsense.
If you’re into new Apple stuff like the watch series 8 or AirPods Pro 2, those are pretty good deals
As an iPhone owner, I’m not sold on dropping 280 or whatever on a watch. Is it really that useful to people?
Yeah that’s fair, and to be sure I don’t engage with mine as frequently as say an iPhone. But for the things I do use it for… mainly activity-related stuff, weather, at a glance notifications… I really appreciate it.
I have a series 6 watch and it is very useful. I can check the time, the weather, and my parents timezone with a glance. It’s nice to control my music without taking my phone out of my pocket, and I enjoy the fitness rings. I’m not a big sports/outdoory person so I can’t speak to how useful it is in that regard. I will say though, I would probably wait until the series 9 comes out because it’s expected to be the first time since the series 6 that they’re significantly improving the efficiency of the chip.
I bought a puzzle box which had a good deal. But that was blind luck. That is I think the first time something I wanted was on sale.
If you’re looking for deals, I like dealnews.com . I’m sure there are similar sites but in my experience they’re great.
that looks like a pretty generic ad site that mostly exists to throw out as many links as possible, whether the sale is real or fake, because they make money either way.
Thanks for the criticism.
Do you have a better deals site to suggest?
I don’t think deals site show deals. I think people who want deals are better off not using a dedicated site based on the premise “we’ll show you the deals.” You’d be better off just buying things you like from any random fucking store—at least then you’re not being tricked into thinking an ad is good for you. It’s also better to avoid shopping for shit you don’t need online, where you’re more likely to impulse buy, or buy something you think you want and then realize when you see it in person that it sucks. Buying in person means you can at least see a thing and figure out if it feels cheap, is bigger or smaller than you want, etc.
But if you want a more complex strategy: figure out the particular things you actually want and figure out how to get deals on those particular things. For example, if you’re looking for suits and shirts and dress shoes, for cheaper than suitsupply and allen edmonds, I’d recommend
- Local thrift shops, if you are willing to learn a bit
- Luxeswap on eBay
- Spier & Mackay on sale / with a referral code
- Charles Tyrwhitt 3/$100, especially if you can try on in store
- Meermin for shoes if you’re near NYC (try on in person), Grant Stone or Lof & Tung if you’re willing to spend a little more, or Loake, Beckett Simonon, or Thursday Boot Co., or on t he very cheap end, Bexley.
If you want a suit for cheaper than that, say $100 new, I’d recommend just looking wherever, trying as many suits on as possible, and looking for 100% wool or some similar fabric—definitely no poly blends, and avoid elastene.
But no deal on any deal site will ever be better than the above advice, and that includes /r/frugalmalefashion, which should really be called /r/salesonmensclothingrelativetotheimaginarystickerprice (almost every post is a terrible sale and they ban any discussion of what is and is not actually a frugal purchase).
If you want advice about furniture, you’d want to look for somebody who knows a thing or two about that. If you want deals on fragrance, find an expert about that. Et cetera, et cetera. But people who run generic deal sites literally don’t know anything about anything except affiliate marketing and ads.
The Verge had a listing for the Hyper-X Cloud II Wireless headset for like $60, but it turned out that price was for the wired version. 🙁
Amazon Fresh (I think you need a Prime membership to access this) is having a lot of buy one get one free items, and lots of coupons (25 to 35% off) on certain items. If you order $100 there’s a 20% off code (FRESHSAVE20).
Also Starz subscriptions are 2 months for 99 cents (a good deal for a non pirate).
Other online retailers are probably running sales to compete with Amazon so I would check other sites.
They’re really bad at showing you the best deals on the site, search for news articles to find the good stuff.
In previous years I’ve got my Roomba, my drone, a good toothbrush. a kindle fire, ring cameras and a cordless vacuum.
All things I wanted and was keeping an eye on so I spotted when the prices dropped.
I grabbed an Intel Arc 750a & a Jackery power station + a 100w portable solar panel. My wife & I have been looking at both of those for a while.
