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Will Amazon Prime Day or Walmart have better deals?
Can’t wait four months for Black Friday? Two of the country’s biggest retailers, Amazon and Walmart, feel the same way, and they are facing off tomorrow with massive, mid-July online shopping events. Both Amazon Prime Day, which offers special sales only for Amazon Prime members, and Walmart’s online sale day, which features pricing “rollbacks” on numerous items, will cover a number of product categories, including electronics, home, baby merchandise, and toys.
Amazon started promoting its sale a week ago when it announced Amazon Prime Day for July 15, ostensibly to commemorate the company’s 20th anniversary. Tomorrow, special offers will be available only to Prime members who pay a $99 a year for its free two-day shipping service, which also includes access to the company’s Prime streaming video and music services. Amazon promises its Prime Day sales will be bigger than what consumers find on Thanksgiving weekend’s Black Friday, and that new deals will be unveiled every 10 minutes. The event, which will feature seven bigger “Deals of the Day” and numerous time-limited “Lightning Deals,” kicks off at midnight tonight Pacific Standard Time (3 a.m. E.S.T.) and expires at 11:59 p.m. P.S.T.
Among the electronics deals on Amazon Prime Day will be specials on some of Amazon’s own products, including the following.
- The Fire TV Stick will be $25 instead of $40
- Kindle—we assume the basic $79 model—will be $30 off its regular price
- Fire HD 7 will have a $60 savings, though its unclear if it’s the 8GB or 16GB version
- The Fire HD 7 Kids Edition will be $60 less than its regular $149 price
There will also be a several deals on TVs, though right now there’s no specific info on brands and models. They include:
- a 32-inch LED LCD TV for $75
- a 40-inch 1080p LED LCD TV for $115
- a name-brand 32-inch smart LED LCD TV for under $200
- and a 50-inch 4K UHD TV bundle priced under $1000
Other deals include a $199 Chromebook, two Nikon Coolpix camera models at half their normal price, and Bose headphones at the lowest price ever offered on Amazon.
But you don’t really have to be a Prime member to take advantage of the sale, since Amazon is offering a free 30-day trial to its service.
Walmart countered this week with its own special sale day, saying that its customers don’t have to pay a premium to get great deals, which is true to a point, though the company started testing a Prime-like free shipping service this summer, called ShippingPass, where those spending at least $50 get free unlimited three-day shipping. But during tomorrow’s online sales event, Walmart is lowering its free shipping minimum to $35, and will have special discounted prices on some 2,000 items. Walmart also offers a free “ship to store” option, where you can buy online and pick up the item at the closest Walmart brick-and-mortar store. Walmart says the sale prices will be good for 90 days.
So far Walmart has tipped its product plans, but we’ll be updating this story as soon as we find out the specific deals.
And Amazon and Walmart aren’t only retailers looking to break up the high seasonality of shopping, which is skewed to the fourth quarter with pre-Black Friday sales. (The term Black Friday was coined to note the day after Thanksgiving, the biggest shopping day of the year when retailers’ balance sheet traditionally went from red to black, into profit territory.) This week Target is holding its own pre-Black Friday sale in July, and Best Buy is holding a two-day sales event—both online and in stores— next week, on July 24 and 25.
If you’re wondering which retailer has the best deals, check back with us again tomorrow when we compare the sales on a number of electronics items.
—James K. Willcox
Consumer Reports has no relationship with any advertisers on this website. Copyright © 2006-2015 Consumers Union of U.S.
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