Cyber Monday 2025 Deals That Weren’t Deals

The Samsung 65-inch QLED TV featured prominently in USA Today’s Cyber Monday 2025 guide was listed at $1,299, marked down from a supposed $2,199 original price. That’s a $900 discount. Sounds staggering. Except that same television sold for $1,249 on Amazon in the third week of October 2025 — no sale, no event, no countdown timer.

That’s not a deal. That’s a $50 price hike dressed in a bow.

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How Retailers Built That “$900 Off” Number Out of Thin Air

The “original price” on most Cyber Monday listings isn’t what most people paid. It’s the MSRP — manufacturer’s suggested retail price — a figure that often exists primarily to make the markdown look impressive. Retailers are legally permitted in most U.S. states to use an MSRP as a reference price even if that price was never charged at their own store.

Samsung’s QLED lineup had an average street price of $1,274 throughout Q3 2025, according to price-tracking aggregator Keepa’s historical data. The $2,199 figure appeared on the retailer’s own product page for approximately 11 days in early September — long enough to legally qualify as the “former price,” short enough that almost nobody paid it. That 11-day window did all the work.

This practice has a name in retail circles: price anchoring. Your brain locks onto the first number it sees and judges everything else against it.

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The Price Your TV Was Actually Worth on November 30, 2025

Real reference price isn’t the MSRP. It isn’t the briefly-inflated tag from September. It’s the median selling price over the 90 days before the sale event. For the Samsung 65-inch QLED in question, that number was $1,261. So the honest headline would have read: “TV now $38 cheaper than average.” Nobody clicks that.

The same pattern showed up across multiple categories in USA Today’s guide. A Dyson V15 vacuum listed at “50% off” had spent 67 of the prior 90 days priced within $40 of the Cyber Monday figure. An Apple Watch Series 10 bundle labeled “lowest price ever” had actually hit a lower price during Amazon’s October Prime Day event six weeks earlier.

A 2024 study by consumer advocacy group Consumer Reports found that 62% of “Black Friday deals” on major electronics were available at the same price or lower at least once in the 90 days before Thanksgiving. Cyber Monday numbers track identically.

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Three Free Tools That Show You the Real Discount Before You Click Buy

CamelCamelCamel is your first stop. Paste any Amazon product URL into the search bar and you’ll see a full price history chart going back to the item’s launch. It takes 20 seconds. You’ll see instantly whether that “sale” price is actually a five-year low or whether the item was cheaper in August.

Keepa works similarly but also alerts you when a price drops to a threshold you set. For non-Amazon retailers, Google Shopping’s price history feature quietly rolled out a broader comparison tool in mid-2025 — click the price graph icon on any product card to see 90-day and 12-month ranges. The Better Business Bureau also maintains a Scam Tracker updated in real time that flags retailers running documented fake-sale complaints.

“I almost bought a Roomba for what I thought was $180 off,” said Carla Mendez, a Phoenix-based accountant who began tracking prices after a frustrating 2024 Cyber Monday. “CamelCamelCamel showed me that price had been the standard Amazon price for six weeks. I waited two months and got it $40 cheaper than the ‘sale’ price.”

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The Month Retailers Don’t Want You to Know About for Electronics Bargains

February. Specifically, the second and third weeks of February. Post-holiday inventory that didn’t clear sits in warehouses costing retailers storage fees, and they move it aggressively. Consumer electronics see genuine markdowns during this window — not anchored to a fake high, but driven by actual inventory pressure.

July is your second window. Amazon’s Prime Day has forced competing retailers — Best Buy, Walmart, Target — to run parallel sales that frequently undercut even Prime Day pricing to capture comparison shoppers. The July 2025 Best Buy sale dropped the same Samsung QLED to $1,199. That’s $100 less than Cyber Monday’s celebrated “deal.”

The pattern holds across fitness trackers, laptops, robot vacuums, and smart home devices. The holiday season creates marketing momentum, not genuine pricing competition. Manufacturers want Q4 revenue, retailers want margin, and the Cyber Monday hype cycle serves both of them — not you.

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Before you buy anything still lingering in your cart from a Cyber Monday guide, run the product URL through CamelCamelCamel right now and screenshot the 12-month price chart. If the “sale” price appears three or more times in that chart, you’re not looking at a deal — you’re looking at the regular price. Share that screenshot in the retailer’s own product review section. Other shoppers will thank you, and you’ll have done more consumer protection work in two minutes than most shopping guides manage all season.