These are the sales to wait for

The weeks leading up to Black Friday might just be more of a hellscape than the big day itself.

Retailers know that we, the hungry customers, are drooling over the impending sales, and that we’re willing to spend money early to avoid stress over the holiday weekend. A study by Salesforce.com shows that the Tuesday and Wednesday before Thanksgiving could see a 20% increase in revenue this year. 

Simultaneous fall sales, Thanksgiving sales, and Veteran’s Day sales don’t help with the confusion. The looming question grows larger with every “pre-Black Friday” price you see: Is there even a point in waiting to buy until Black Friday?

For a handful of key items, yup. While you may be able to skip clothing, furniture, and mattresses over Black Friday, big-ticket items like kitchen appliances, gaming consoles, and TVs are ones that will probably see their best prices on Black Friday. I mean, there’s a reason that money spent on actual Black Friday breaks its own record each year.

Here are the Black Friday sales worth waiting for:

Kitchen appliances: KitchenAid and new Instant Pot devices

Though they’re on sale pretty frequently, KitchenAid mixers often see their lowest price points of the year by an extra $10 to $50 on Black Friday. The XL 6-quart and 7-quart Pro Series Bowl-Lift stand mixers are frequently left out of other sales throughout the year, so if you see it on sale, grab it. And beware of inflated prices before Black Friday: Amazon currently has the 6-quart “on sale” for $499.99, but that’s its regular price on KitchenAid’s site.

Truth be told, Instant Pot sales that offer less than 30% off aren’t exciting anymore. Instant Pot models that have been around for a while (like the Lux or Duo) are almost always on sale just for shits and giggles. The 10-in-1 Ultra was nearly 50% off in Oct. 2019 for no reason. The Lux has been $10 cheaper than Prime Day multiple times. If retailers want to make Black Friday worth it, they’ll have to really slash these prices.

However, you should take advantage of sale prices on newer Instant Pot devices that weren’t around for Black Friday 2018. Instant Pot released its air fryer in July 2019 and it has only been on sale once. Even newer items like the Instant Pot Viva rice cookers and the Instant Omni toaster oven will probably see their first-ever discount on Black Friday 2019.

Consoles and games: PS4, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch

Many new Xbox, PS4, and Switch games are conveniently being released before Black Friday: Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield, and Death Stranding are all coming in Nov. 2019. Walmart, Amazon, Target, and the like are known for dropping incredible Black Friday deals on console bundles with new games that have been full price since their release.

The fact that the PlayStation 5 or a new Xbox are mere rumors with no hard release dates until at least 2020 means Sony and Microsoft will likely use Black Friday as a way to keep customers buying the “older” consoles instead of waiting.

IF YOU SEE THE NINTENDO SWITCH ON SALE, COP THAT SHIT. The Switch is notorious for rarely dropping below the $299.99 mark. But because the Nintendo Switch Lite was the only big console release this year, we wouldn’t be surprised if more emphasis was put on the classic Switch (now with improved battery life, which came out in August). Last year, a Black Friday bundle deal got you the Switch plus Mario Kart Deluxe 8 for free, which is one of the biggest Switch “discounts” we’ve ever seen — and it hasn’t been around since.

4K TVs

65-inch and 75-inch models, to be exact. Last year, Walmart took the cake for cheapest TV with a 40-inch doorbuster deal for just $99. But the deals may shift to bigger TVs this year: Business Insider talked with Vivek Pandya, Digital Insights Manager at Adobe, about what Black Friday 2019 could hold for TV deals — and 75-inch TVs may just be the big doorbusters this season. Instead of grabbing the cheapest TV to fit on the TV stand they already have, the birth of at-home 4K streaming has people splurging on elaborate home entertainment rigs. 

Based on that, we can also assume that Dolby Atmos sound bars will also be a big sale item.

One nuance: TVs over 75 inches probably won’t see any better discounts than they have right now. Walmart and Amazon are constantly quietly slashing $1,000 off of massive Samsung, Sony, and LG TVs without a shopping holiday (probably because they’re so expensive to start with), and it’s hard to see them going any lower. If we were you, we’d just cop that 82-inch TV right now.

New Echo devices: Echo Buds, Echo Frames, and Echo Show 8

Black Friday is also seeing some new faces from Amazon this year: Amazon’s annual hardware event in late Sept. 2019 brought us a slew of never-before-seen Alexa-enabled items (like the Echo Buds and Echo Frames) as well as some new generations of current Echo devices (like the Echo Show 8, which hasn’t been on sale like its smaller counterparts have). Their release that late in the year means they didn’t even have a chance go on sale for Prime Day, and some items aren’t even available until late November — meaning Black Friday deals will be the first time a lot of these items will have been discounted ever.

More coverage: Black Friday 2019