Black Friday 2026: which deal categories to trust, and which to check every time
Black Friday 2026 is on Friday, November 27, and Cyber Monday is on Monday, November 30. Over those four days you will see more discount badges than at any other time of year. Some of them are the best prices of the year. Some are ordinary prices with a bigger number crossed out next to them. The useful question is not “is it on sale?” but “which kinds of deal are most likely to be padded?”
We can answer that with data. Every week since July we have checked a fresh sample of advertised Amazon deals across 13 categories for the Fake Deal Index, and we measured Amazon’s October event, Prime Big Deal Days, while it was live. Here is what that says about where to trust a Black Friday badge and where to check it.
Two numbers for every category
The first column is how often a deal in that category was not meaningfully below its usual price across 15 ordinary weeks (July 6 to October 19, about 24,700 deals). The second is the same measurement during Prime Big Deal Days (1,750 deals, taken once while the event was live). Lower is better.
| Category | Ordinary weeks | Prime Big Deal Days |
|---|---|---|
| Computers | 33.6% | 4% |
| Office | 28.6% | 25% |
| Furniture | 24.7% | 18% |
| Toys & Games | 24.1% | 3% |
| Video Games | 23.3% | 5% |
| Health | 20.9% | 6% |
| Pet Supplies | 19.9% | 4% |
| Electronics | 19.5% | 0% |
| Beauty | 15.9% | 7% |
| Tools | 15.3% | 4% |
| Home & Kitchen | 13.3% | 6% |
| Sports & Outdoors | 3.6% | 0% |
| Shoes & Apparel | 2.4% | 1% |
Two patterns jump out. First, almost every category was far more honest during the event than in an ordinary week: overall, 6% against about 19%. Second, two categories did not follow the rule.
Check every time: office supplies and furniture
Office supplies carried fake discounts on 28.6% of deals in ordinary weeks and still 25% during the event. That is the most stubborn category we measure. Notebooks, folders, filing boxes and desk organizers are cheap, bought in bulk and rarely compared, so a badge on an unchanged price works almost as well during a sale as outside one.
Furniture improved during the event, from 24.7% to 18%, but nearly one in five furniture “deals” was still not a real discount. Furniture list prices are high and many pieces have no identical competing listing, which makes the usual price hard for a shopper to know. If a desk, chair or table is on your Black Friday list, look at its price history before you trust the percentage.
Usually honest on the day, risky in the run-up
Computers are the category to be most careful with outside the event and the one that changed most during it: 33.6% fake in ordinary weeks, 4% during Prime Big Deal Days. Laptops and desktops carry list prices well above what they sell for, so a badge is easy to show in any week. When real competition arrives, the padding disappears. If you want a laptop, the data says the event days themselves are a much safer time to buy than the weeks before.
Electronics (headphones, speakers, TVs and the like) went from 19.5% to 0%: every electronics deal we checked during the event was genuinely below its usual price. Toys, video games, health and pet supplies all fell from around 20–24% to 6% or less.
Generally safe, but read the “was” price carefully
Sports & outdoors and shoes & apparel were rarely busted in any week (3.6% and 2.4%). These categories are discounted so constantly that an advertised deal is usually at or below what the item has been selling for. The struck-through price, though, is often a list price nobody pays, so do not judge how good the deal is by the size of the percentage.
What we cannot tell you yet
These are October and summer numbers. Black Friday is a bigger event than Prime Big Deal Days, with more retailers and more pressure, and the pattern may not hold exactly. We publish the weekly figure on our Black Friday fake deal tracker, so you can watch the November weeks come in rather than rely on last month.
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.
The short version for your list
- Office supplies and furniture: check the price history every time, even on the day.
- Computers and electronics: wait for the event days if you can; the run-up weeks were the riskiest time to buy them in our data.
- Shoes, apparel and sporting goods: deals are usually real prices; ignore the size of the percentage.
- Anything: paste the product link into worthitforyou to see where today’s price sits against a year of real prices. It is free.
For why the weeks before the event deserve extra care, see “Early Black Friday” deals are where the fake discounts hide, and for a timetable, our week-by-week Black Friday plan.
BUY / WAIT / SKIP / FAIR come only from a product Check, never from a blog post.