Black Friday deals to avoid in 2026: 10 buys where the sale price is the small number

A Black Friday badge tells you what a product costs on the day. It says nothing about the ink, pods, heads, bags or monthly plan that come after. These are ten purchases where our own research found the second number is bigger than the first, with the figure, the date we checked it and what we would do instead.

Ten Black Friday deals we would think twice about

1A £35 inkjet printer

The cheapest printer to buy is rarely the cheapest to own. At 50 black pages a month, a £179 Epson ET-2861 overtakes a £34.99 Canon TS3750i after about 2,100 pages, which is 42 months. Print 20 pages a month and it takes almost nine years, so the cheap one can still be the right buy for a light user. None of the 32 document printers in Amazon UK’s top 50 gave a cost per page on its listing.

What we would do: Work out your pages a month first. Over 1,800 black pages, the Brother HL-L2400DW laser was the cheapest pick we found at £132.89 including the printer. The working is in printers priced per page.

2A video doorbell that needs a plan

Ring and Google both charge before you can watch recorded video back, so the sale price is a deposit. We call the point where the plan passes the hardware the overtake month. Our own record adds a second caution: the Ring Battery Video Doorbell 2K was £44.99 on 26 August and £79.99 on 5 November, so a November cut back to £44.99 would be the summer price returning.

What we would do: If you do not want a monthly bill, buy a doorbell that stores video locally. eufy does, with no fee. The working is in video doorbells with no subscription.

3A monitored alarm kit

With alarms, human monitoring is where the money goes. A £50 saving on the kit is recovered by the provider in six weeks of fees. The kit discount is real, but it is not the number that decides what you pay.

What we would do: Decide on monitoring before you look at kit prices, and compare three-year totals. The working is in the subscription tax index.

4A pod coffee machine

Pod machines are cheap in November because the pods are not. The sum changes with the pod: against compatible Original-line pods at about 25p each, the bean machine takes about two and a half years to catch up, and against Tassimo’s Kenco Americano Grande over four.

What we would do: If you would buy Nespresso’s own capsules or Vertuo pods, price a bean-to-cup machine first. If you are happy with 25p compatibles, the pod machine is fine. The working is in bean-to-cup against pod machines.

5A robot vacuum with a self-empty dock

Dock bags are the small part: £3.04 to £7.90 a year on the models we priced on 8 November. Filters, brushes and mop pads on the maker’s schedule are the larger part. Suction figures do not help you compare either. Of 19 robot vacuums in Amazon UK’s chart, 18 quoted a pascal figure and none named a test method.

What we would do: Look up the price of a year of bags, filters and brushes for the exact model before the sale, and add it to the price. The working is in robot vacuums by yearly cost.

6A premium electric toothbrush

Toothbrush handles are a Black Friday staple and the heads are where the difference sits: £4.62 each for iO heads against £2.40 for standard Oral-B heads, and iO heads only fit iO handles. The NHS says it does not matter whether you brush with an electric or a manual brush, as long as you brush properly.

What we would do: Price 20 heads before the handle. Compatible heads brought the Vitality Pro’s five-year cost down to £37.90. The working is in electric toothbrushes by five-year cost.

7An electric shaver

None of the 15 face shavers in Amazon UK’s foil and rotary charts gave a replacement-head price, and none of the three Braun listings mentioned the 18-month interval that Braun’s own head listings state.

What we would do: Search for the replacement head before you buy the shaver. If you cannot find one, treat that as part of the price. The working is in electric shavers by five-year cost.

8A smartwatch

None of the five watches we recommend needs a subscription, and none of the twenty best-selling smartwatch listings on Amazon UK mentioned one. The offer arrives after you have set the watch up.

What we would do: Buy the watch for what it does without a plan, and ignore free-trial offers bundled with a sale price. The working is in smartwatches and their subscriptions.

9An Amazon device at half price

Amazon says its own devices are discounted from 16 November. A badge reading 50% off that lands at about £40 is the August price coming back, not a new low. That may still be the right moment to buy, but it is not the saving the badge implies.

What we would do: Press Price history on the listing and compare the deal with the lowest point on the chart. The working is in the six prices we fixed in August.

10Any Limited time deal badge you have not checked

Two of those four prices had not moved since October or earlier. Over the same basket, all 8 Early Black Friday badges did mark a new low, and 9 products were at a new low with no badge at all. The badge is not the signal. The price record is.

What we would do: Check the record. Ours is public for 74 products, and Amazon now shows up to 365 days of price history on product pages. The working is in the Black Friday price tracker.

The real cost of a Black Friday deal, side by side

The same ten, reduced to the number that the sale price leaves out.

Electricity belongs in the same sum for anything that heats. Our appliance running cost calculator turns a wattage and an hour count into pounds at the current price cap, and electric heaters are the category to watch this year: the median price of the heaters we track is 15.5% higher than on 6 September, and four of the six with a price cost more than their own autumn low.

So what is worth buying?

Deals on things with no afterlife of costs are the simple ones to judge: the price either beats the record or it does not. On 13 November the products in our basket that did beat it were two FireAngel carbon monoxide alarms, two Pro Breeze dehumidifiers, a Pro Breeze oil-filled radiator, a eufy alarm kit, a Revolution LED mask and a La Roche-Posay sunscreen. Each is listed with its full price record in the Black Friday price tracker. For anything else, the deal checker does the sum from the was price, the sale price and the lowest recent price, and the Black Friday deals UK 2026 hub has the dates and the rules retailers have to follow on reference prices.

Questions people ask

Which Black Friday deals should I avoid?

Avoid judging any deal on the sale price alone when the product has a running cost. In our research the clearest cases are cheap inkjet printers, video doorbells and alarms that need a monthly plan, pod coffee machines, premium electric toothbrushes and shavers with expensive heads. In each case a cost that comes after the sale is larger than the discount.

Is it worth waiting for Black Friday?

Sometimes. On 13 November 2026, 8 of the 74 Amazon UK products we track carried an Early Black Friday badge on a price lower than anything we had recorded since September, by 5.4% to 22.5%. But 30 products cost more than their own autumn low, so a discount on those has to be deep just to get back to a price they already sold at.

How do I work out the real cost of a product?

Add the purchase price to three years of whatever it needs to keep working: ink, pods, heads, bags, filters, a subscription and electricity. Then compare products on that total. A product that is £50 cheaper today can be £150 dearer by the third year.

How this list was put together

Each entry is taken from a Look Into page published between September and November 2026, where the prices, the makers’ replacement intervals and the arithmetic are shown in full with the date they were read. We have not tested these products. Prices move, so treat each figure as true on its date and check the linked page for the latest reading. This page carries no shopping links and nobody paid to be on it or kept off it.