Waiting for Black Friday on November 27 to buy gifts is a bet that the price will be lowest on one specific day. You don’t have to make that bet anymore. Target and Best Buy are both running a holiday price adjustment guarantee this year, which means you can buy now, and if the price drops later in the season, you ask for the difference back. The catch is that you have to ask. The money doesn’t come back on its own, and a guarantee you never use costs the store nothing.
Black Friday is rarely the cheapest day, so stop timing it
The whole case for waiting rests on the idea that Black Friday is the bottom. The evidence says otherwise. When the UK consumer group Which? tracked 175 appliances and tech products across eight retailers from May 2024 to May 2025, it found that 83% were the same price or cheaper at least once outside the Black Friday sales window (the study was published November 25, 2025). One Samsung TV was cheaper than its Black Friday price on 134 separate days in the six months that followed.
That’s a UK study, and US retailers run their own calendars. Still, the pattern lines up with what Adobe saw here. In its recap of the 2025 season, Adobe reported that electronics hit a peak discount of 30.9% and toys hit 29.6% across November and December, and Cyber Monday (not Black Friday) was the single biggest online spending day of the year at $14.25 billion. Deals are spread across weeks. Nobody can predict which day your specific item bottoms out, including you.
So don’t try. Buy when the price is reasonable and the item is in stock, then let the retailer’s own policy catch the drop.
The holiday price adjustment windows are wider than most shoppers realize
Most of the time, Target’s price match covers its own price drops for 14 days after you buy. During the holidays, that stretches. Target’s 2026 holiday fact sheet, updated November 5, says its Holiday Price Match Guarantee runs from November 1 through December 24. If you buy a toy today and Target cuts the price on December 20, you’re still covered. Note that this applies to Target’s own lower price at Target.com or your local store. Target doesn’t match Walmart or Amazon.
Best Buy goes further on the calendar. Its price match page says most products bought from October 30 through December 31 can be price matched against Best Buy’s own lower price through January 15. That covers Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the post-Christmas clearance week. Best Buy’s fine print does carve some things out: Marketplace items, open-box, clearance, refurbished, and special daily or hourly sales. So a flash doorbuster that lasts three hours may not count. A regular weekly sale price usually will.
Amazon is the outlier. It doesn’t do price adjustments at all, according to Kiplinger’s rundown of holiday policies. With Amazon, your only lever is returning the item and buying it again at the lower price, which works but costs you a trip to a drop-off point.
Your credit card won’t save you here anymore
Ten years ago, a lot of people relied on credit card price protection for this exact problem. You’d buy something, see it cheaper later, and the card issuer refunded the gap. Those days are mostly gone. Consumer Reports covered the rollback back in 2018: Chase removed price protection from all its cards that August, Discover dropped it that October, and Citi cut its Price Rewind caps to $200 per item and $1,000 per year. Most cards in your wallet today have nothing of the kind.
That changes the math. If the retailer’s guarantee is the only safety net, then picking stores with a long holiday window matters more than picking the card with the best rewards. Spending $400 at a store that will refund a price drop through January beats spending $400 somewhere with a 14-day window and earning an extra 1% back.
What claiming a holiday price adjustment is worth in real dollars
Say your gift list has $300 of electronics (a pair of earbuds and a smart speaker) and $300 of toys (a building set and a couple of board games), and you buy all of it at Best Buy and Target this week at regular price.
Now suppose each item later hits the average peak discount Adobe recorded last season. On the electronics, 30.9% of $300 is $92.70. On the toys, 29.6% of $300 is $88.80. Add them and you get $181.50 back on a $600 haul, just for asking. That’s the best-case drop, so treat it as a ceiling. Even if only half your items dip, and only by half that much, you’re still looking at roughly $45, which is real money for maybe twenty minutes of chat-window time across the whole season.
Compare that to the waiting strategy. If you hold off and buy everything on November 27, you get whatever Black Friday price happens to be on offer, plus the risk that the building set your kid wants sells out on Thanksgiving night. Buying early with an adjustment guarantee gets you the item now and the lower price later. Waiting gets you only the price, and only if the timing works out.
The ten-minute routine that makes the claim happen
A guarantee only pays if you remember it exists by mid-December, and by mid-December nobody remembers what they paid for anything in early November. So I don’t rely on memory. When I buy a gift at Target or Best Buy between now and Christmas, I put it on one running note on my phone with the store, the price paid, the order number, and the date. That note is the whole system. Every Sunday through December, I spend five minutes checking those items on the store’s app. If the price has dropped, I open the store’s online chat (Target and Best Buy both handle this through chat for online orders) with the order number ready. For in-store purchases, Target asks for the original receipt, and it won’t accept a screenshot as proof of the lower price, so pull it up live on Target.com or in the app.
Two dates go on my calendar right now. December 24 is the last day of Target’s holiday guarantee, and January 15 is Best Buy’s deadline. If you’re putting gifts on a credit card, it’s also worth knowing when your statement closes so the refund lands before you pay; we covered that in our piece on timing your credit card statement closing date around holiday spending. And if you’re running a cash envelope for gifts, put the refunds back in it instead of letting them disappear into checking. Our one-envelope holiday cash stuffing method works well with this.
A few traps to watch. Price adjustments go back to your original payment method, so if you paid with a Target GiftCard from a promotion, that purchase may not qualify at all. Matches have to be identical down to color and model number, so the blue version of the speaker doesn’t count against the black one. And Best Buy holds the line on Marketplace sellers, so check that the “sold by” field says Best Buy before you buy.
Buy early, file the holiday price adjustment, and keep the difference
The 2026 holiday rules give you a free option. Buy gifts now at Target or Best Buy, keep a simple list, and check prices once a week. When a drop shows up, a holiday price adjustment claim gets your money back, and the deadlines (December 24 at Target, January 15 at Best Buy) give you more time than most people think. Black Friday becomes just another day you check your list, and if that’s the day the price falls, you get the difference back.
