Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Deals

What to buy in the Memorial Day sales: A beginner’s guide

By

Memorial Day sales are coming soon, but not every deal is worth your attention and hard-earned money. Early planning for the Memorial Day 2021 sales event can help you find the best bargains on the products you want and save both your time and money by avoiding the deals that fall short. By watching today’s sales trends, weighing current market factors, and looking back at previous years Digital Trends can give you the information and guidance to make your Memorial Day sales hunt for the best deals suitably, um, memorable.

When are the Memorial Day sales?

Memorial Day 2021 is on May 31, but the sales will start earlier. Because Memorial Day is always the last Monday of May, retailers have traditionally run their Memorial Day sales events starting the previous Friday. So, if everyone stayed strictly faithful to tradition, this year you’d want to be on the deals hunt from Friday, May 28 to Monday, May 31. But, as you may have noticed during last year’s pandemic-delayed mid-October Prime Day sale and around Black Friday’s annual bargain blowout in 2019 and 2020, some major retailers jump the calendar and start a week or two early. Some sales linger on a few days after the official event dates, but it’s more common to see early budget-worthy sales during the lead-up. We have any inside information about retailer plans to start Memorial Day 2021 sales early, but it could happen.

What Memorial Day deals can we expect?

Three factors are in heavy play for 2021’s Memorial Day sales: seasonality, tradition, and the pandemic effect.

  • Seasonality: As a general rule you’ll save more by buying seasonal goods from the previous season than from the upcoming or new season. For many people, Memorial Day marks the beginning of summer and the end of Spring. So while you will see sales on summer products like swimwear, air conditioners, and grills in Memorial Day sales, you’ll save even more if you wait to buy those products in mid-August or September. Examples of seasonal spring items likely to have the deepest discounts during Memorial Day sales are fishing gear, bicycles, hiking and camping gear, golf clubs and bags, garden supplies, and other product categories that attract avid shoppers as soon as the snow melts. Many people like to shop for camera deals in the spring, also, but if you can hang in the very best buys for cameras are during Black Friday.
  • Tradition: If you look back to previous Memorial Day sales you’ll see the great buys on mattresses, major appliances, and outdoor tools and equipment for the yard or garden. Furniture sales are also often big draws during Memorial Day but halt during the hot and hazy days of summer. This year you’re sure to have magnificent opportunities to save on mattresses from brands like Tuft & Needle, Casper, and Nectar and appliances, tools, and outdoor equipment from Lowe’s, The Home Depot, and Wayfair.
  • The Pandemic Effect: During 2020 many of us stayed home. All the time. We worked, cooked, and sought entertainment at home because they weren’t possible, convenient, or even allowed in some cases outside the home. Working from home meant we needed faster and better electronic equipment. High-quality desks, office chairs, and task lighting also suddenly more important for our homes than ever before and sales in all of those product categories took off. Home gym equipment became harder to find than hand sanitizer by mid-2020 and the popularity of video communications drove sales of high-quality webcams. When manufacturing lines began to function again in the second half of 2020, the unfulfilled demand for products for work, working out, cooking, and entertainment in the home led to huge production goals. We’re still focused on improving our homes to make them more comfortable, fun, and safe and because products that meet those needs often overlap with traditional Memorial Day sales categories, we fully expect to see bargains galore. Watch for productivity and entertainment deals on Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, Microsoft, Dell, and more.

Should I shop for bargains during Memorial Day Sales?

You can absolutely count on Memorial Day sales at both ends of the spectrum. There will be jaw-dropping bargains and rock-solid great deals that you’ll wish you jumped on if you miss them. There will also be plenty of deals that were only so-so and some that we’d label no-no. The more prepared you are for shopping Memorial Day sales the more likely you are to score the jaw-droppers and to avoid the no-nos.

Related

The best strategy for Memorial Day sales and any other highly anticipated sales event is to plan ahead. List what you’re looking for, prioritize if possible, and determine ahead of time the price points that will make you jump, think twice, yawn, or run away. Some savvy buyers make two lists: Needs and Wants. When they shop the sales they don’t allow themselves to buy anything on the Wants list until they’ve checked off all the Needs. Be that kind of buyer. And let us help. We’ll monitor good deals on key product categories and from major brands and continue to provide the latest info to help you win big during the Memorial Day sales.

Editors' Recommendations

Bruce Brown
Bruce Brown
Contributing Editor
Digital Trends Contributing Editor Bruce Brown is a member of the Smart Homes and Commerce teams. Bruce uses smart devices…
Powerful gaming laptops have huge discounts in the Lenovo flash sale
Working on a Lenovo 500w laptop in class.

If you're looking to grab yourself a great gaming laptop, then you'll be happy to know that Lenovo is having a flash sale with some really big discounts. In fact, we've collected two of our favorite deals below, with both having the same GPU but with some variations in CPU performance and amount of RAM, so you can really dial in the type of laptop you want. That said, if neither of these deals quite do it for you, be sure to check out these other great gaming laptop deals instead.

Legion Pro 5 Gen 8 with RTX 4070 -- $1,500, was $2,000

Read more
Hurry! The GoPro Hero12 has a $100 price cut at beat buy
GoPro HERO12 offers waterproof use.

There are a lot of action cameras on the market, but one of the best and most well-known is the GoPro, so if you want something that can handle your active lifestyle, a GoPro is a great option. That said, GoPro cameras can be quite expensive, which is why you'll likely want to grab a deal on one to save you a little bit extra. Luckily, this GoPro Hero12 has a great deal on it from Best Buy that discounts it down to $300 from $400, saving you a solid $100, which is a nice discount.

Why you should buy the GoPro Hero12
One of the most important parts of any action camera is its video quality, and you'll be happy to know that the Hero12 can manage a whopping 5k at 60fps, which is pretty impressive for something so small. If you need more frames, you could go for the equally impressive 4K at 120fps, which is still quite impressive, and you could even go as fast as 240fps at 2.7K, so you have a lot of options when it comes to resolutions and framerates that work best for you. Another big positive is that the Hero12 has a pretty large field of view and can capture an aspect ratio of 8:7, which is pretty massive, all things considered.

Read more
The new Microsoft Surface Pro 9 is $330 off at Best Buy
Qualcomm super resolution demo superimposed on a Microsoft Surface Pro 9.

If you like the idea of the MacBook Air but don't want to be in the Apple ecosystem, then you'll be happy to know that there are some great alternatives, and they're much cheaper than you'd expect. A great example is the Surface Pro 9, which is really Microsft's answer to the MacBooks; being slim and packed with features, it's essentially a high-end tablet and laptop rolled into one. You can even get your hands on it for just $770 rather than the usually steep $1,100 price, meaning you save yourself a whopping $330 in the process.

Why you should buy the Surface Pro 9
There is a lot of love about the Surface Pro 9, and a big part of that is the overall design and build; weighing in at 1.94 pounds and 0.37 inches thick, it easily competes with something like the MacBook Air in terms of size. It's even more impressive when you consider that you're getting an Intel Evo Platform Core i5 under the hood, which is a mid-range processor that's very similar to the same desktop PC version. That means you get a lot more power out of the laptop as a whole, and it should easily handle most of your productivity and day-to-day work without any issues and you might even be able to get some slight creativity work and gaming done, too.

Read more