When prices actually drop
The U.S. retail calendar as it really behaves: which events move which categories, why tax-free weekends rarely help with electronics, and why a successor launch beats any sale.
By Ahsan Khan, Founder. Published . 6-minute read.
Summary
Most of the year's genuine price movement happens on a schedule, and the schedule is not the one the advertising suggests. Televisions and appliances follow model years. Phones follow successor launches. Mattresses and large appliances follow the long holiday weekends. Almost nothing follows the countdown timer on the page.
The single most useful rule: for any product with a known successor, the launch of that successor usually moves the outgoing model's price further than any seasonal sale, and it happens on a date you can look up in advance.
The events, and what each one actually moves
These are the fixed events our calendar tracks, with the categories each is entered against. The windows matter as much as the dates: Black Friday pricing now opens weeks early and Cyber Week runs on afterwards, so we watch three weeks before the day and several days after.
| Event | When | What genuinely moves |
|---|---|---|
| Black Friday | Friday after the fourth Thursday in November; watched from three weeks before | TVs, soundbars, headphones, laptops, small kitchen appliances, console bundles |
| Cyber Monday and Cyber Week | The Monday after, then the following week | Online-only restocks of what sold out, accessories, laptops, headphones |
| Post-holiday clearance | December 26 to mid-January | Open-box and returned stock, floor models, anything seasonal |
| Super Bowl run-up | The two weeks before the second Sunday in February | TVs and soundbars, as the previous model year is cleared before spring lineups land |
| Presidents' Day | Third Monday in February | Appliances, mattresses, furniture |
| Memorial Day | Last Monday in May | Appliances, mattresses, grills, outdoor goods |
| Independence Day | July 4 | Appliances, TVs, grills |
| Back to school | Mid-July to the first week of September | Laptops, tablets, headphones, dorm goods |
| Labor Day | First Monday in September | Appliances, mattresses, laptops, TVs |
| Columbus Day | Second Monday in October | Appliances, as the fall changeover clears the floor |
Amazon's Prime Day and its October counterpart sit outside the fixed calendar: Amazon announces the dates, and our configuration holds them empty until it does. Walmart, Target and Best Buy run competing events in the same week, and that cross-retailer pressure is what makes the window useful even if you never shop at Amazon.
Launch cycles, which matter more than any sale
A seasonal sale asks a retailer to give up margin. A successor launch changes what the old model is worth. The second is a larger and more durable force, and unlike a sale it is predictable months ahead. These are the cycles we track for the forecaster.
| Product line | Typical window |
|---|---|
| Apple iPhone | Second week of September |
| Samsung Galaxy S | Late January into February |
| Samsung Galaxy Z foldables | July into August |
| Google Pixel | August to October |
| OnePlus flagship | January into February |
| Apple wearables and headphones | September, alongside the phone event |
The pattern to internalize is the two-step. At announcement the outgoing model's official price is cut, or it is dropped from the line-up, and retailers start clearing stock. Weeks later the remaining inventory has to move, and that is when the cheapest listings appear. If you buy one generation behind, that second step usually beats the November sale, and you can plan for it.
The same logic runs outside phones on slower clocks. TV makers announce next year's lineups in January and ship them through spring, so last year's sets are weakest between the announcement and the changeover. Large appliances turn over in late summer and early fall, which is why the September and October holidays are appliance events rather than electronics events. Laptops move with chip generations, so back-to-school is their reliable window.
State tax-free weekends, and their limits
Seventeen states in our table run sales-tax holidays: Texas, Florida, Ohio, Tennessee, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, New Mexico, Arkansas, Alabama, Iowa, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Connecticut and West Virginia. Some are permanent in statute, some are re-authorized each session, and some lapse, so our calendar holds all of them unset until that state's revenue department publishes the year's dates.
- The saving is the sales tax, not a discount. In a high-tax jurisdiction on an expensive item that is real money; on a cheap item it is noise, and it is always smaller than a decent seasonal price cut.
- Only listed categories qualify, and the lists are narrow. Clothing and school supplies are nearly universal; computers appear in only a handful of states, and televisions and large appliances almost never do.
- States cap the price per item, and above the cap the whole item is taxable rather than the excess. Read the cap and the definition of a qualifying computer before assuming a machine is covered.
- Massachusetts, and Ohio in the years it has run a broad one, are the exceptions worth knowing: those holidays cover most retail goods under a per-item cap rather than a short category list.
- A tax holiday that coincides with a promotion is genuinely good timing; a tax holiday alone rarely beats waiting for the category's own event.
How to use this in practice
- Work out which clock your product is on: a successor with a known launch window, a model year, or neither. If a successor is due within a couple of months, that launch is your event and the seasonal calendar is a distraction.
- If it is on a model year, buy at the changeover: late winter and spring for televisions, early fall for large appliances.
- If it is on neither clock, pick the event your category actually appears in above and treat the rest of the year as noise.
- Do not buy on the first morning of a multi-day event. Prices move during the window as retailers react to each other.
- Check what the price was three or four weeks before the event began. A price that climbed on the way in is the commonest way an event discount turns out to be nothing.
Questions shoppers ask
Is Black Friday still the best time to buy?
For televisions, headphones, soundbars and small kitchen appliances it remains the deepest event of the year. For anything on a successor cycle it usually is not, because the launch has already reset the price. For large appliances and mattresses, the long holiday weekends earlier in the year compete with it.
When is Prime Day, and should I wait for it?
Amazon announces the dates, typically a few weeks ahead, and until it does our calendar leaves them blank rather than guessing. The week is worth watching mainly because Walmart, Target and Best Buy schedule competing events against it, so the pressure reaches products you would not buy from Amazon at all.
How much do prices actually fall at these events?
We deliberately do not publish a typical figure. It varies by category, retailer and year, and a number quoted here would be a guess dressed up as data. What we publish instead is the observed history of each product we track, so you can see what happened to that item last time rather than what happens on average.
Does the site tell me when to wait?
That is what the verdict is for, once there are prices to judge: Buy now, Good deal, Wait or Skip, with a forecast drop of more than 5% within a fortnight producing Wait even when today's price looks good, and an expected successor launch pushing the same way. No product carries a verdict yet — our first retailer data sources are still in application review — so for now the windows above are what to plan around.
What this is built on
- config/retail-calendar.yaml — The events, their windows, the per-state tax-holiday table and the launch cycles on this page are the ones the forecaster uses.
- State revenue departments — Tax-holiday dates and per-item caps are taken from each state's own announcement each year, never carried over from the previous year.
Putting this to use
- How we score a deal — the published weights, the verdict thresholds, and the former-price test this guide refers to.
- How we make money — affiliate links, and the architectural reason a commission cannot move a verdict.
- All guides and explainers
Bylined and human-reviewed, not generated per product: 2% of machine-written sections on this site are sampled for review, and 100% of guides are. Editorial policy and corrections.