Christmas Price Wars Begin Early: How to Navigate Holiday Discounts and Avoid Overpaying

The reason is that most people expect prices to be reduced further before Christmas.

Price war very early
Gingerbread, marshmallows and Christmas soft drinks are already in grocery stores.

While Kiwi, for example, has reduced the price of thin pork ribs and smoked Christmas ham from Gilde by 38 and 22 per cent respectively, Coop Extra can reveal that they have reduced the price by up to 37 per cent. Xtra Ribberull will decrease the most from NOK 52.30 to NOK 32.90.

The price war starts earlier this year, and most experts expect the prices of the most common Christmas foods to be pushed down later next month. So to avoid being fooled by the offers, it’s a good idea to wait to buy Christmas food until you actually use it.

Artificially high prices
Even if the prices are lowered, it is first and foremost about how much they are lowered. TV 2 helps you has examined Christmas products, and it can be concluded that many Christmas products are priced unnaturally high at the beginning of the season. You can save a lot of money by waiting to buy both Christmas marzipan and gingerbread.

Compared to last year’s prices just before Christmas, many of the items are now twice as expensive.

“Everything indicates that the food chains raise higher margins on Christmas products at the beginning of the season,” Professor Tor Wallin Andreassen at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) told TV 2 and said:

“They are taking advantage of the interest in the news. You have a warm, good feeling about the Christmas goods and you look forward to eating the first Christmas cookies, the first Christmas marzipan and Christmas cheese , or drinking the first soda of Christmas.”

The price of the electronics is fixed
We see the same trend in the products that people traditionally buy on Black Friday or Black Week. The news website Tek.no has researched the prices of electronics and white goods in particular, and found that a number of goods were increased in price in October.

Last year, a record was set for the number of prices changed before the tender days in November. Now the record has been broken again. In October, the price of everything that Prisjakt runs increased by 35 percent. This is equivalent to more than 2.3 million prices. Electronics are the type of product that gets set up the most during Black Week.

“So there is a clear decline from last year’s figures”, explains the head of Norway Prisjakt, Christoffer Reina.

Wrong
On October 1 last year, a new law came into force that requires shops to declare the price of a product before the offer starts, and that the product has had this price for at least 30 days before it starts the offer.

Many believe that this is the reason why the prices are established in October – long before the beginning of any campaigns in November.

The big chains believe that it is unfair that they are left out because of price changes, and they believe that it is to the advantage of consumers that they have promotions from time to time on several objects.