The other day, I was standing in Fred Meyer and noticed that all of the TVs were on sale. I assumed this was because it’s football season. Companies either are encouraging people to buy new TVs for football season or it’s an annual trend that can be observed in their data. This got me to thinking that football season is likely the best time to buy a TV for the companies selling those TVs, but when is the best time to buy for the consumer?
To start, we need to decide which TVs to look at for their price data. Using rtings TV reviews we can narrow down our price history search to just the 7 TVs listed. I currently have a 55" LG 4k TV, however a few of the TVs on the list don’t come in that size. So we will go with 65" TVs as a starting point for price data. The TVs on the list are a mix of OLED and LED, so we will just ignore that as a factor. For easy reference here are the TVs:
- Samsung S90C OLED
- Sony A95K OLED
- Sony X93L/X93CL
- LG C2 OLED
- Hisense U8K
- TCL 5 Series/S555 2022 QLED
- Hisense A65K
Before I start looking for price data for the TVs above I am going to make a few guesses. First, my gut says that football season is one of the worst times to buy a TV. Retailers are smart. They can inflate the price months ahead of salesin order to driver the perception of a screaming deal. In addition to football season I expect that Black Friday is also a bad time. I am guessing that after the height of the retail season is the best time to be looking, so sometime in late January. This might prove wrong because the superbowl is usually in early February. So maybe late February? I also guess that Cyber Monday has some actual deals. This is just a guess and likely wrong.
To try and answer this question, I scoured the internet for data sources. Unfortunately, what I found was either pay-walled or hard to get data going back more than 3 months. Google, for instance, has a product price history chart, but it only goes back 3 months and you cannot play with the underlying data. Here is an example of Google’s price history for the Samsung S90C:
With Google’s price history, we can’t answer the broader question of when is the best time to buy a TV, but we can say whether there is price gouging going on for the football season. Using the season start date of September 7th, here is the price changes per TV around that time:
| TV | price change |
|---|---|
| Samsung S90C OLED | Dropped $332 on September 3rd, lots of fluctuation within $300 for the rest of the month |
| Sony A95K OLED | Mostly flat, dropped $100 the weekend of the 7th |
| Sony X93L/X93CL | No price graph, ranged within $100 though |
| LG C2 OLED | Also no price graph, ranged with $100 |
| Hisense U8K | Not available |
| TCL 5 Series | The S555 price data was unavailable, but the S535 was and had no change for 3 months |
| Hisense A65K | Not available |
Okay, from this we have a limited amount of data, but it seems you can save money by paying attention to sales. The table is roughly ordered by price, so it seems you can only get savings on the more expensive TVs.
I wasn’t satisfied with this. I wasn’t able to find a consistent price tracker that didn’t force you to pay for Wal-mart. Amazon has https://camelcamelcamel.com/ where we can look at the graphs but not get the raw data. Unfortunately, looking over the TVs on the list was not very enlightening. A lot of the TVs weren’t available. For those that were, it was hard to see the exact change amounts. BestBuy has a great price tracking site, https://thepricecatcher.com/, from here I was able to get data for all the TVs going back at least a year. This comes with the caveat that some of the models are not a year old, so I used the previous model instead.
First, looking at the overall price data for the TVs.
This can be a bit hard to read with all the TVs turned on. If you click them all off and look one-by-one, it is easier to decipher. It seems most of the TVs were relatively stable, with slight increases and decreases. The Samsung S90C seems to be the one standout of jumping in price $600 and staying there until the end of September.Now let’s look at the median percent price change. This gives us a way to look at the overall trends a bit easier.
From the plot, you can see that, as a whole, using this small sample of TV prices, the prices don’t change much. We are within 5% most of the time with the extremes being +/- 8% change.
Looking at the mean % change and the % change by TV is a lot more volatile, but doesn’t show any consistent trends.
Overall, I don’t think I was able to find enough data to make any conclusions. The Google data seems to refute my guess that you shouldn’t buy a TV at the start of the football season. However, that was missing a few TVs and was only for 3 months. The data from thepricecatcher was much better, but showed no consistent trends. Again, this likely has to do with the small sample size and confounding factors. For instance, there seems to be more variability with more expensive TVs than with cheap TVs. So maybe if I had focused on all TVs in a subsection of the market, I would have better data. Either way it was an interesting exercise. I didn’t learn a lot about TV prices, but I did learn more about price tracking and embedding plots in Hugo.