How you can get the best Black Friday deals without going to a store

PITTSBURGH — The doors are locked and there are no long lines wrapping around stores like best buy this year.

It’s a complete reversal of the trend that for several years had stores opening earlier, and earlier, turning Black Friday, into Brown Thanksgiving.

“What do you think of this, closed, locked tight? It’s crazy to me cause every year I’m out in the crazy crowds! So this is tough. This is tough,” said Rachel Mitchell.

How about this for a strange site ---a parking lot-- empty!

“It’s a good thing, I think, get to spend time with family. Everybody slow down a little bit,” said online shopper David Bice.

There was one lonely tent pitched out in front of Game Stop on McKnight Road.

The PlayStation 5 is one of the hardest items to get this year, so these boys lined up Wednesday night at 9 p.m. to be there when the store opens Friday morning.

“It’s cold. Rain wasn’t any fun last night. Worth it? I don’t know. Not sure anymore,” said Dillan Ulrich.

With most stores like Best Buy, Target and Walmart all closed on Thanksgiving, most shoppers are turning to online shopping for those hot items and good deals.

Websites like BlackFriday.com can make it easy for you to search multiple stores all in one place to get the best deals. They compile all of the major stores’ ads for you and then allow you to go ahead and click through to the store you want to see what deals they’re offering on any one day.

The Honey app is another great online tool. Just download and click it when you checkout, and it searches the web for all the coupon codes that apply.

If you have a few favorite stores, sign up for their newsletter and you’ll get notified first on special offers. Then after the holidays, if you don’t want the clutter in your mailbox, just unsubscribe.

Thanksgiving and Black Friday 2020: Store hours announced (NCD)

Cox Media Group