Black Friday in a Shortage Year: What to Actually Expect
With PS5, Xbox Series X, and RTX 30-series still scarce, this Black Friday is about restocks, not doorbusters.
Black Friday is two days away, and retailers have already started previewing deals: laptops, headphones, smart home gadgets, the usual grab bag of accessories at 20-30% off. But let’s be honest about what this Black Friday actually is for anyone who cares about the hottest hardware of the year. It’s not about doorbusters. It’s about restocks.
The PS5, Xbox Series X, and Nvidia’s RTX 30-series cards have all been essentially unavailable at list price since launch. Every one of them sells out within minutes whenever a batch appears, and demand shows no sign of slowing as we head into the holiday. Black Friday deals on TVs and blenders are nice, but the real event this week is whether retailers manage to get meaningful quantities of these three products back in stock, and whether ordinary shoppers can actually get one before bots and resellers clear the shelves.
Why the traditional deals matter less this year
In a normal year, Black Friday is a discounting event — retailers cut prices to move inventory. This year, for the products people actually want, there’s no inventory to discount. Nvidia, Sony, and Microsoft are all still working through supply constraints tied to chip production and, in some cases, general pandemic-related manufacturing disruption. When demand outstrips supply this dramatically, discounting doesn’t make sense — a $499 console or $699 graphics card sells out at full price just as fast as it would at 10% off. So don’t expect markdowns on the consoles or cards themselves. Expect restocks, sold at MSRP, disappearing almost instantly.
What to actually watch for
If you’re hunting for a PS5, Series X, or an RTX 3070/3080/3090, the practical advice is the same it’s been since launch: watch retailer stock trackers and social media accounts that flag restocks in real time, have a payment method ready, and don’t expect a leisurely Black Friday morning of comparison shopping. These drops have been happening with little warning and vanishing within minutes.
For everything else — laptops, monitors, SSDs, headphones — this is a genuinely good week to buy. Traditional Black Friday inventory hasn’t been hit by the same shortages, and retailers are competing normally for your dollars there. If you need a new laptop for remote work or school, or you want to upgrade a monitor, the deals previewed this week look like real, meaningful discounts.
The bigger question hanging over all of this is how long the shortage drags on. Nvidia and the console makers have both signaled that supply should improve into next year, but “improve” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and nobody’s given a date where you can just walk into a store and buy an RTX 3080 or a PS5 off the shelf. My honest expectation: this Black Friday will produce a handful of chaotic restock windows, a lot of frustrated shoppers, and no meaningful dent in the underlying scarcity. If you land one of the big three this week, consider it a win. If you don’t, you’re in good company — and there’s a decent chance the shortage stretches well into 2021.