Black Friday on TV news vs my wife's report

as I always do. I've suspected merchants have figured out how to manipulate the public and fool them into a feeding frenzy. The media is geared up to report of people fighting over trivial things and they won't allow themselves to be disappointed. Peach and harmony don't sell. Hype and hyperbole do. Unfortunately, our politicians have adopted some of the same practices.

Just to waste time this past year, I did an experiment to see just how good some of the deals were that merchants offered but, rather than go into the stores, I used those with on-line shopping capabilities. I created several shopping carts using multiple profiles on my primary PC and added items to the carts that I really had little or no interest in purchasing. I did this a couple of weeks before "Black Friday". I focused on items that were already very deeply discounted. What I noticed was that prices crept up higher just prior to that Friday and many of them remained high even that day. Since BF is over, many of those prices are back to where they were before. Amazon showed the most price movement during this period. I could expect this practice allows for merchants to raise prices early and create the false impression of once-in-a lifetime deals but why didn't they drop the prices on items that had just been increased? My guess is that items that really were on clearance type sales would be a distraction from what the merchant really wanted to sell so they, virtually, moved them to the back room only to bring them back out later.