2019’s best places to shop on Black Friday

Black Friday shopping is one of America’s most treasured holiday traditions. But there’s always a bit of hassle involved. Shoppers have to get up early, stand in endless lines at stores and try to find deals through hordes of other shoppers — all in the name of savings.

That tradition is changing, however. Black Friday sales are starting earlier, weeks ahead of the actual shopping holiday at some stores. And many retailers are offering even steeper price cuts or other discount promotions, both in store and online, just to stay ahead of their competitors. That’s good news for shoppers, especially those who prefer to shop from home. So which stores offer the best discounts and for which items?

To answer that question and help consumers maximize their Black Friday savings, WalletHub surveyed nearly 8,000 deals from 29 of the biggest U.S. retailers’ 2019 Black Friday ad scans. Below, we’ve listed the stores offering the largest advertised discounts in various product categories such as “Jewelry” and “Appliances.” Read on for the full list, our methodology and shopping wisdom from a panel of experts.

Best places to shop on Black Friday

Notes:

• The pie chart above displays the product categories in which discounts are more heavily concentrated, represented in percentage terms. The percentages do not represent average discounts.
• The bar graph above displays the average discount percentage for each product category.

Methodology

In order to determine the retailers offering the most money-saving bargains this coming Black Friday, WalletHub surveyed nearly 8,000 deals from 29 of the biggest U.S. retailers’ 2019 Black Friday ad scans and calculated the average discount that each retailer plans to offer. The average discount was weighted based on the prediscounted price of the item in order to give more credit to the retailers discounting higher-ticket items. Our sample excludes deals that did not have calculable percentage markdowns.

We then organized the deals into 11 product categories such as “Apparel & Accessories,” “Consumer Electronics” and “Video Games.” When calculating the category averages, we took into account only the retailers that had at least five discounted items in that particular category.

For this report, we examined the following 29 retailers:

1. Academy Sports + Outdoors
2. Ace Hardware
3. Amazon
4. Bealls Florida
5. Belk
6. Best Buy
7. Big Lots
8. BJ’s
9. Costco
10. Dell Home
11. Dick’s Sporting Goods
12. Fred Meyer
13. Harbor Freight
14. HP
15. JCPenney
16. Kmart
17. Kohl’s
18. Lenovo
19. Macy’s
20. Meijer
21. New York & Company
22. Nordstrom
23. Office Depot and OfficeMax
24. Sears
25. Stage (includes its five brands: Stage, Bealls (not to be confused with Bealls of Florida), Goody’s, Palais Royal and Peebles)
26. Staples
27. Target
28. True Value
29. Walmart

Amazon did not provide all the requested info for all their Black Friday deals. As a result, some deals could not be included in our calculations. A total of 251 deals were included.

This article first appeared on WalletHub.