Is it a bargain or obsolete?
It's getting harder to know when to buy — The day after Christmas, prices on big-screen TVs went down and Raul Axtle pounced. — Axtle and his 16-year-old son, Shaheen, headed to a Best Buy electronics store in Emeryville, Calif., to buy the TV that Shaheen …
Context & Ripple Effects
A year after Wired covered retailers locking shoppers out of post-holiday doorbusters during the 2005 holiday season, the New York Times flips to the other side of the counter: the day-after-Christmas markdown. Big-screen TV prices fell sharply once the gifting rush ended, and buyers like Raul Axtle moved immediately — his Emeryville Best Buy trip with his son captured the new calculus facing electronics shoppers.
First-order effects
- Retailers like Best Buy clear holiday inventory at thinner margins while holdout shoppers such as Axtle capture steep post-Christmas discounts on big-screen sets.
- Anyone who bought the same TV at full price weeks earlier sees the value of their purchase reset overnight, sharpening anxiety about when to buy.
Second-order effects
- Flat-panel makers' rapid model turnover makes last season's premium set depreciate fast, pushing retailers toward ever-earlier and deeper markdown cycles instead of holding list price.
- Techdirt's syndicated take framed the dilemma as product improvements outpacing even deliberate obsolescence — an argument that waiting for the next model no longer guarantees a better buy.
Third-order effects
- If improvement cycles keep compressing the useful life of consumer electronics, 'when to buy' becomes a permanent structural problem for consumers and a core competitive lever for mass retailers.
The trend: Consumer electronics are shifting toward improvement-driven obsolescence, where faster product cycles — not wear — dictate both price depreciation and the timing of purchases.