A man unveiled a number of Home Depot Black Friday sales prices that didn’t offer actual savings and went as far as to declare the tactic a “scam.”
The accusatory video came from SideMoneyTom (@sidemoneytom), a TikTok creator with more than 140,000 followers. This particular video, which went up on Sunday, has more than 588,000 views as of this writing.
He starts by looking at a Ryobi 18-volt high-pressure inflator listed as a Black Friday deal for $24.97. But he looks at the price tag underneath the Black Friday one, which lists the exact same price.
He tours the store and finds a few more “deals” like that. “You have Black Friday sales tags on all these items, but if you take a little bit closer of a look, like this one says $19.97,” he says, looking at a Daytona Smash Burger kit with a tag that says “was $29.97.”
“If you look behind it, this is what it was regularly selling for,” he notes. (Perhaps it was $29.97 at one time, but the tag behind Black Friday one reflects identical $19.97 pricing.)
“This Shockwave drone right here, Black Friday deal, $34.88—literally the exact same,” he remarks, unveiling a similar tagging system. He uncovers a few more tags in the store that show the same pattern.
“This is just confirming a suspicion that I already had,” he surmises. “At stores like this, nowadays, at least, Black Friday is literally a scam, literally just a marketing ploy put on by giant companies to get idiots to line up and fight over goods that are literally the exact same price that they were last week.”
He then pledges, “I’ll keep exposing the truth.”
More on the video
Fortune wrote about the same video in an article released Thursday. There, its author declared, “Black Friday has lost its luster—at least for some shoppers who have discovered some deals aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”
The article also quoted Matt Voda, CEO of marketing software company OptiMine, who observed, “Leading retailers invest heavily in their customer relationships and trust is a major component of this. Trust is difficult and slow to build, but lost very easily and quickly with such practices.”
“All kinds of pricing shenanigans have been going on for decades,” added Luke Kachersky, an associate professor of marketing at the Fordham Gabelli School of Business. “For example, retailers displaying things like, ‘regularly $X, now $Y,’ even though it’s hard to imagine the retailer ever having really offered the item—or anyone ever buying it—at the ‘regular’ price.”
He added that while a company could argue it’s just repacking and newly presenting its prices to avoid legal repercussions for any false advertising claims, that wouldn’t keep consumers from feeling misled upon seeing a TikTok like Tom’s.
Tom’s not the first to call attention to this. Last week, the Daily Dot covered a Home Depot Black Friday deal on a Husky tool set for $99 that some claimed was routinely priced at $99.
@sidemoneytom Wow such deals this black friday #fyp #homedepot #tools ♬ original sound – SideMoneyTom
What commenters thought
Commenters reacted as you might expect.
“Home Depot is an absolute rip off,” one contended.
Another queried, “How is this even real?”
One, ready with an answer, said, “Because they think people are dumb.”
But one flipped the script, saying, “If you fell for what this guy showing you then you probably are. Zoom in on the ladder tag; the one underneath clearly shows the dates of the sale. All tags are changed in case the sale tag falls off.”
Another said, “Black Friday sales at Home Depot started a month ago. Also the tags on the beams are changed on Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Been that way the 20 years I have been there.”
The Daily Dot has reached out to Tom via TikTok comment and to Home Depot via email.
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