Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday Sales are upon us, did you do your homework?

Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday sales are here, and while major retailers have been announcing deep discounts for today and tomorrow, you could get ripped off if you didn’t keep track of the possible items you might want to buy.

Whether you’re planning on buying online, on site, or both, there’s a chance you could get an item marked with over 50% off without knowing that’s actually at the same price from the week before, or even worse, a cheaply mass produced piece merchandise just for these sales days. As that old saying goes, “if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.”

During the last few weeks there have been many warnings about the possible fake and/or cheaply made merchandise for certain stores. For example, some retailers will get an specific model HDTV, but it could very well be a past model with  different frame, or even made with cheap materials to compensate for the apparent “deep discounted” price, especially now that 4K HDTVs are making the old 1080p models drop in price. Check the model number if you can to make sure you’re not getting an old item, or that there’s no shady business between the maker and the retailer.

As always remember not to be fooled by sales associates trying to make a buck off of you when it comes to certain accessories, like HDMI cables. Read this from a few years back, that shady pitch is still practiced to this day.

Another example have been the drop in price of certain game consoles, like the Xbox One and the PlayStation4 dropping to around $299. Sam’s Club has the PS4 for about $299, while The Microsoft Store and Best Buy have the Xbox One for about $299. The only problem is those are the 500gb consoles.

The same goes for gift cards. It’s easy to find cheap gift cards on eBay, but don’t be fooled into buying one that appears to be more than exceptionally cheap.

On a personal note, it bothers me how so many stores will open today and deprive their employees from a good Thanksgiving meal. Back when the craziness that is now known as Black Friday started stores still respected the Thanksgiving Day holiday. Black Friday used to mark the beginning of the Christmas sales season, and over time it became the day of the deep discounted sales after Thanksgiving Day. Thanks to greedy retail stores, Thanksgiving has become nothing more than another sales day before Black Friday and the Cyber weekend.

Stores like Macy’s, Sears, Target, and others will open as early as 3pm on Thanksgiving day, and remain open until late on Black Friday. This means that while their executives enjoy their Thanksgiving dinner with their family and friends, workers will not even get a lunch. To make thinks even weirder, McDonald’s has been promoting that they’ll be open 24hours on Thanksgiving day.

Many people have tried to petition many big chain stores to stop this practice of ruining Thanksgiving day by making employees work, even though these stores don’t provide an essential service, like water, gas, or electricity. Every single petition has fallen on deaf ears, but I think we’ve been doing it wrong; instead of asking them to let their employees take the day off, we should ask their big shot executives and CEOs to work on their local stores with the rest of their floor employees during the sales rush. If they’re not getting to enjoy their holiday, nobody should.