A week-by-week Black Friday 2026 plan that avoids fake deals

Black Friday 2026 falls on Friday, November 27, the day after Thanksgiving, and Cyber Monday on Monday, November 30. That leaves about five weeks from today. The best way to get real deals is not to react to badges as they appear, but to know in advance what you want and what each item normally costs. Here is a plan, built around what our weekly data shows about when fake discounts are most common.

Why a plan helps

In 15 weeks of the Fake Deal Index, about 19% of advertised Amazon deals were not meaningfully below their usual price. During Amazon’s October event, Prime Big Deal Days, that fell to 6%. In other words, the badge is least reliable in ordinary weeks and most reliable on the event days themselves, and it varies a lot by category (see which categories to trust). A plan lets you use that: check early, buy at the right moment, and ignore the noise in between.

Now to early November: make the list and learn the usual prices

• Write down what you actually want. Specific products, not categories: the exact model, size and pack count. Variants often have different prices and different histories.
• Find each item’s usual price. Paste each product link into worthitforyou to see where its price has sat over the past year, including its usual level and its lows. Write the usual price next to each item. This is the single most useful number you can have on Black Friday.
• Note which items are in the risky categories. In our data, computers, office supplies and furniture carried the most fake discounts. Mark them; they need a second look whatever the badge says.
• Save the items you will come back to. In the worthitforyou app, the Saved tab keeps a list you can check again later with one tap.

Early to mid November: check, don’t chase

This is the stretch most likely to look like an ordinary week, with lots of “early Black Friday” badges and no event-day competition. We explain why in “Early Black Friday” deals are where the fake discounts hide.

• When an item on your list shows a deal, compare it with the usual price you wrote down. If it is near the lowest price of the year, buy it: a genuine low is a genuine low, whatever the calendar says.
• If it is roughly the usual price, skip it for now. The badge is not information.
• Glance at the weekly number. Our Black Friday fake deal tracker publishes the share of fake deals every week. A rising number means more padding in the run-up.

Thanksgiving week (November 23–27): be ready, buy on the day

• Re-check each item the day before and on Black Friday itself. Prices can move several times over the event.
• Buy when today’s price is clearly below the usual price you noted, ideally near the year’s low. That is what a real Black Friday deal looks like.
• Do not be moved by countdown timers or “only a few left” messages. They say nothing about whether the price is good.
• For office supplies and furniture, check even on the day. In our October event measurement they stayed padded (25% and 18%) while most categories cleaned up.

Cyber Monday (November 30) and after

• Anything you did not buy on Black Friday gets one more look. Use the same rule: below the usual price, near the low, then buy.
• If something you bought drops further, check whether the retailer will adjust the price or accept a return under its own policy. Policies vary, so read the terms for your purchase.
• After the event, the badges do not go away, but in October the fake-discount share rose again in the weeks after the event. December “deals” deserve the same check.

A one-line rule for the whole season

Compare today’s price with what the product usually costs, not with the number the seller crossed out. Everything else in this plan is a way of making that comparison easy when it matters.

How these numbers are measured

Every week we take a fresh sample of advertised Amazon deals, about 1,500 to 1,750 of them, spread across 13 shopping categories so that no single category dominates. For each one we compare today’s price with the price that product has usually sold for over the previous 90 days, using our own price research. A deal counts as “not really a deal” (we call it busted) when today’s price is within 8% of that usual price or higher. In other words, the discount badge is there, but the price is not meaningfully lower than what the product normally costs.

That rule is deliberately generous to retailers. A product that is 9% below its usual price passes, even if its struck-through “was” price is wildly inflated. So the share you see is a floor, not a ceiling: the real number of misleading discounts is, if anything, higher. Each week’s report, its examples and a downloadable CSV are on the Fake Deal Index, and the full method is on our methodology page.