Best Things To Buy In February from msn.com
It's a great time to buy really big TVs, winter coats and ski vacations, and Presidents Day sales are coming up.
Valentine's Day deals are predictably not great. Since this is the time of year when jewelry, flowers and perfume are at their highest demand, it's not surprising that shoppers probably won't get the best price possible. Perfumes, for example, generally see better discounts in late February, after Valentine's Day, and in March. Try buying your sweetheart a less-routine Valentine's Day gift in a category that's more likely to see a fair discount.
Prepare for Presidents Day sales. The best part about a holiday weekend isn't necessarily the day off, but rather the inevitable sales. You can expect quite a few Presidents Day sales during the three-day weekend that will take as much as 80% off on a plethora of apparel, as well as tools, bedding and furniture. Some retailers tend to offer deeper discounts on existing sales, while others will lean toward modest coupons (likely an extra 20% to 30% off) that are applicable sitewide. Look to clothing and department stores for a big Presidents Day sale push.
It's tablet time. Rumors continue to swirl about the release date of the iPad 3, and many folks believe that it will be announced at the end of February. If that is indeed the case, then we'll likely see immediate markdowns on refurbished iPad 2 units sold by Apple, as well as substantial cuts on new iPad 2 devices from resellers.
Expect electronics clearance sales. As new electronics are unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show and begin to hit shelves, retailers make room for them by offering discounts on old stock. This effort continues in February, and includes markdowns on electronics like GPS units and audio equipment -- the latter of which we've already started to see excellent deals on.
Wait on digital cameras. Common logic dictates that we'd similarly see the best deals of the year on digital cameras during February, as retailers clear camera inventory post-CES. However, our deal archives paint a different picture. Although we've seen some excellent bargains during February, those discounts and promotions have paled in comparison with November and December in terms of Editors' Choice-caliber offers. In the past two years, both of those later months have each seen roughly four times as many top deals as February.
An excellent time for outerwear. Big sales will continue through February, though typically the selection is less robust. But that might not be the case if you're looking specifically for a winter coat, as the mild season has reportedly left retailers with massive amounts of unsold inventory, therefore making this perhaps one of the best years to get a deal on a late-in-the-season coat. If you've been putting off replacing your tried-and-true wool or down coat, February and March will be excellent months to snag a deal.
An increase in the number of ski resort deals. Since snow has been hard to come by this winter, the number of travelers booking trips to ski resort towns has been unusually low. Although numerous locations recently received a fresh dusting of powder, the ski season has been damaged due to mild weather. We've already seen an influx of special skiing discounts on vacations and hotels in ski towns like Keystone, Colo., Salt Lake City and Park City, Utah, and more, as they try to salvage a weak tourist season.
Wait until March to catch up on movies. Throughout the year we tend to see daily deal sites discount bulk movie tickets, and cinema chains often offer promotions for ticket sales as well. But strangely enough, those types of movie deals have largely been missing in February for the past two years. In February 2011, we didn't see a single deal for discounted movie vouchers, and the year before, we only saw an offer from AMC to watch a marathon of the Oscar best picture nominees.
Go big on HDTVs. Unfortunately, the head-turning deals we saw on 42-inch LCD HDTVs in November and December came to a quicker-than-expected end in January as prices on name-brand and third-tier 42-inch sets jumped back to their pre-September averages. Likewise, 55-inch 3-D LCDs slowly made the transition from $999 back to $1,337. But that doesn't mean TVs should be off your radar just yet.
Laptops. Fully equipped desktop replacements (those with 17-inch screens, Core i7 CPUs, and 8GB of RAM) are still enjoying all-time lows. During the past three months, we've seen deals on these 17-inch premium systems hit $800 -- a price we've never seen before. Dual-core 15-inch laptops, however, have gone up in price, slowly reaching their pre-holiday average of roughly $330.
