That’s why I love deal communities like Slickdeals, if the deal sucks someone will be calling it out

This is very noticeable on Amazon especially. So many “deals” from budget brands or one-off Chinese brands that nobody has never heard of. This is especially noticeable on Prime Day too.

I have worked with buyers at Best Buy that negotiate these “deals”. The manufacturers will create a near identical version of a higher quality product, but the model number will be a sub-model (like -a). When uninformed consumers are bargain shopping for a deal they will see that the “same” model is more expensive elsewhere and think they are getting a deal. This sub-model product will have cheaper components and fewer features and a higher product margin.

Some of these products would have very high failure rates but the companies still keep doing this because it helps to push their extended warranties. Then people buy them even when they buy higher quality products because they remember the failure on the other one.

Long story short, don’t shop on Black Friday for deals in electronics.

That's undoubtedly true in general, but there are exceptions. For example:

It's a little hard to tell just looking at specifications without directly comparing in person, but I think the Costco Black Friday-specific version of the Roland FP-10 digital piano actually manages to be better than the normal version (even before you consider that it's cheaper and comes with a bunch of accessories). Specifically, it has 128 voice polyphony instead of the regular 96, and the only other difference I can find is that it advertises "a custom selection of tones curated by Roland and Costco exclusively for the FRP-2-ACR," which I hope doesn't mean they're worse.

I got a smart TV about 10 years ago on Black Friday. It was fine until a few years the screen "bruised". Everything now has a purple hue and that is the "guest" tv. No other lcd tv I've had has had the same issues.