Just bought something that is a “Black Friday” deal. It was an excellent deal - I haven’t seen the price beaten anywhere. But it’s two weeks before it’s actually Black Friday… and this was the last one in stock. And since this deal started at noon and less than an hour later every store in town now shows “out of stock” it looks like every location only had one.
Goddammit I was just clicking “buy” when you took that.
When are they getting more in? Cuz whatever it is, I want one now.
mmm
It’s a good thing I ordered the two I wanted yesterday.
Following tradition, they’ll have a bunch for sale for half what I paid 2 weeks after Christmas.
If they can sell things at these prices in November, aren’t they overcharging you the rest of the year?
You’re lucky. I was going to get the last one but I had to run upstairs for my credit card.
Well, a pro tip about that. Just leave your credit card on file with every single website, you’ll get everything you want and then some.
Really, you’ll get everything you deserve and then some.
Not to worry - it’s back in stock!
Delivery cost is a bit steep, though.
I wonder about that. My brother, decades ago, owned a jewelry shop and I asked him about the constant “50% off everything in the shop” sales that I saw at jewelers. He told me that his markup was 100-200% of his costs and that he would still make a small profit selling at 50% of ticket price. He also said, “Go in and see if you can buy a watch during one of those sales. There won’t be any in store because the markup on watches is tiny.”
I bet that would give you the most interesting poop of your life.
In theory, no, because they have a lower volume of sales during the rest of the year.
I didn’t say what I bought because the phenomenon is more than just that item, but also because people are people and would think “You think you got a great deal? Challenge accepted!” and devolve into links for a used broken one on Facebook for less. It’s sort of inspiring that people did that even without knowing what it was. 
I might be tempted to buy a used vegetarian haggis off of Facebook under the right circumstances.
I knew someone who had a store selling music boxes. He said that they did the vast majority of their sales around Christmas and would happy to shut down for 10 months of the year, but the mall wouldn’t let them.
I wonder what how the seaonal sales are at jewelers.
I wonder if they moved it two days later there would be discounts on Goodyear blimps.
Or plastique.
That’s not actually uncommon or necessarily nefarious. Online stores, bike shops for example, may not have much (or sometimes any) of their own inventory and are just resellers for the same wholesale warehouse. So if you buy the last item from shop X then it’ll disappear from shops Q, Y, and Z since that item was coming from the same wholesaler .
Other products like down jackets, think The North Face, Marmot, Mountain Hardware, Rab, etc., may only do small production runs, such that they their own inventory and their resellers inventory gradually depletes. Will they do another manufacturing run? Will they change SKU’s to something different? Will they mix up the product line completely? When? I actually reached out to Rab once to ask, because I couldn’t find a particular jacket I liked in my size in August, and they said they were going to do another production run in October. Sure enough they all got stocked up again, but it can be tricky to tell if something is discontinued (last one available, forever!), or just backordered (last one available, for the next six weeks).
How would you tell it was used?