As if Black Friday isn't already competitive enough, Walmart is hoping to give its customers one less reason to venture out to another retailer: It's promising to match or beat the best deals on dozens of advertised specials offered by several key competitors, right up to Black Friday.
Starting at 8:00 a.m tomorrow (Friday, November 22nd), Walmart will match or beat the advertised prices on about 100 promoted items offered by key retail chains, including Best Buy, Target, and Toys R Us. Not surprisingly, the list is heavy on toys and electronics.
Among the 11 items Walmart has so far revealed is a 50-inch LCD TV from LG Electronics—we believe it's the 50LN5100—that it will sell for $448. In our previous post about the Best Black Friday TV deals, we mentioned that Best Buy will offer the 55-inch version of the set for $500 on Black Friday, about half off its current price.
Find more deals and tips in our guide to holiday shopping.
Other items covered in the price-match promotion are the LeapFrog LeadPad 2 Explorer tablet for $40, down from about $80, and a few games—including Call of Duty: Ghosts—for the new Xbox One and PlayStation 4 video-game systems. To see the rest of the deals being offered, Walmart recommends visiting your local store's Facebook page.
As we previously mentioned, Walmart is expanding its "one-hour guarantee" program to cover 21 products—including 13 electronic items—an increase from just three last year. That means that anyone who is in one of the designated lines at their local Walmart store between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. or 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving evening is guaranteed to get one of the specials, either immediately that night or by Christmas. (You can pick it up from any Walmart store.) Among the deals covered by the one-hour guarantee at the 6:00 p.m. event are a 32-inch Funai LCD TV for $98, and a 60-inch 1080p Vizio Smart LED 1080p HDTV (E601i-A3) for $688.
We'll be continuing our Black Friday coverage right up to and including Cyber Monday, so keep checking back for the latest updates.
—James K. Willcox
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