Best Buy refreshed its Price Match Guarantee on September 2, 2026, and one line in the exclusions is worth real money to you. The policy does not cover “items denoted as Black Friday pricing” or “items for sale the Thursday before Thanksgiving Day through the Monday after Thanksgiving.” In 2026 that runs November 19 through November 30. Twelve days. The exact twelve days you were planning to do your shopping.
That is not a loophole anyone is hiding from you. It is printed on the policy page. It just gets left out of every article that tells you to “request a price adjustment if the price drops,” because those articles are written as lists of time windows and nobody reads the fine print underneath. The result is that people walk into Cyber Week believing they have a safety net, buy at what turns out to be the second best price of the season, and discover in December that the refund they were counting on was never available for that purchase.
The fix is not to watch prices harder. It is to move your purchase date so the window works in your favor.
Your credit card stopped protecting prices years ago
For about a decade, the standard advice was to put the purchase on a card with price protection and file a claim when the price fell. That advice is dead. Visa and Mastercard ended their network level price protection programs in 2018, and issuers followed fast. Chase dropped the benefit in August 2018. American Express ended it on consumer cards in 2019, as did Citi, which shut down Price Rewind on September 22, 2019. USAA ended its version on August 31, 2019. Price tracking tools made claims cheap to file and expensive to pay, and the benefit stopped penciling out for issuers.
So the card is out. What is left is the retailer’s own policy, and retailers have been quietly narrowing those too. Target stopped matching competitor prices on July 28, 2025. Its guarantee now covers only Target’s own prices, in stores, on Target.com, and through Target Circle deals, and only for 14 days after you buy.
The price adjustment window is the entire game
Strip away the marketing and every one of these policies is the same mechanism. The retailer agrees that for a set number of days after your purchase, if its own price falls, you can ask for the difference back. Everything that matters follows from how long that stretch is and which calendar days it covers.
Target gives you 14 days. Best Buy ties the claim to your return and exchange period, which is 15 days for most products and 60 days for people who pay for the My Best Buy Plus or My Best Buy Total tiers. Best Buy also allows more than one claim per item inside that period, which almost nobody uses. Costco runs 30 days on its own price reductions. Apple gives 14 days from when you receive the item, not from when you order it.
That last distinction matters more than it sounds. A window measured from delivery on something backordered in November can easily stretch three weeks past the day you clicked buy.
October’s deal days are a trap if you plan to claim later
The season now starts in the first week of October. Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days ran October 6 and 7 in 2026, Walmart’s Deal Days ran October 5 through 11, and Target Circle Week ran October 6 through 12. The prices are real. The problem is arithmetic. Buy a television during Target Circle Week on October 6 and your 14 day claim period closes on October 20, more than a month before the deepest discounts of the year land.
And the discounts do get deeper. Adobe Analytics, which tracks a trillion visits to US retail sites, found that electronics discounts peaked at 30.9% off list price during the 2025 holiday season, up from 30.1% the year before, with televisions at 19% and toys peaking at 23%. Shoppers spent $257.8 billion online between November 1 and December 31, 2025, a 6.8% jump from $241.4 billion the year before, and Cyber Monday alone took in $14.25 billion. The October price is rarely the floor. It is the opening offer.
The blackout is narrower than it looks, and December is where the money sits
Best Buy’s exclusion applies to prices offered during that Thursday to Monday stretch. It does not freeze your claim period, and it does not cover December. Prices fall again in the first two weeks of December as retailers clear inventory before shipping cutoffs, and those drops sit inside a 60 day window that started in mid November. If you are already mapping out when to buy what, the buying calendar we put together in June pairs well with this.
So the move is to buy before the blackout starts, not during it, and to make sure your claim period is long enough to reach into December.
What $150 back actually looks like
Say you want a television listed at $749.99 and you buy it at Best Buy on Friday, November 13, a week before the blackout opens. On the standard 15 day return period, your claim window closes on November 28, which falls entirely inside the excluded stretch. Every price you see that week is unmatchable. You get nothing.
Now run the same purchase as a paid member with the 60 day period. Your window runs from November 13 to roughly January 12. The Thanksgiving week prices are still off limits. But when that television drops to $599.99 on December 3, you call and claim the difference. That is $150 back on a single item, and Best Buy’s own FAQ says you can do it more than once in the period if the price keeps sliding. On a $749.99 purchase, the 60 day window is worth 20% of the price and the 15 day window is worth zero, and the only thing separating them is which return period your purchase falls under.
The same logic applies at Costco, where the 30 day clock on a November 13 purchase reaches December 13 and covers the post Thanksgiving markdowns that Best Buy excludes.
Do this before the next deal day
Write down three things for every big purchase you are planning: the retailer, the length of its price adjustment period, and whether that period is measured from purchase or delivery. Then count forward on a calendar and see where it lands. If the window closes before December 1, either wait to buy or accept that the price you pay is final.
Keep the receipt or order number somewhere you can find it in thirty seconds, because every one of these policies requires proof of purchase and most claims die from the hassle of digging it up. Best Buy takes online price match requests only by phone at 1-888-BEST BUY or through chat, not in stores and not by email. Target handles them at Guest Services or by phone within 14 days. Costco members request theirs online or in the warehouse.
And check one thing on your existing purchases: Best Buy refunds 100% of the difference, including tax, on anything scheduled for delivery if the price drops before the delivery date, and pre-orders are automatically charged the lower price at shipment. That one is free money and it requires nothing but a phone call.
Treat the price adjustment as a deadline rather than a discount. The people who collect refunds this December are the ones who picked a purchase date in November that put the December markdowns inside their window. The people who miss out bought in October because the deal looked good at the time. While you are counting days, count the return clock too, since the holiday return window rules we covered in September have the same October problem.
