The Model Number Is the Whole Comparison

Everything you can check about a product hangs off its model number. Best Buy will match a competitor’s price only on “a matching brand, model number and color”. Target requires the identical item down to the model number.

Which makes the model number the load-bearing part of every comparison you make in November, and the easiest thing in the listing to skim past.

What happens when the number is unique

Two named outlets have reported the same practice, both in November 2022. How-To Geek described manufacturers and retailers “manufacturing specific models for Black Friday” — sets that appear to be a certain model but differ slightly, and carry their own model number. Market Realist described the same thing under the industry’s own word for it, derivative models, and called them scaled-back versions of the higher-end sets.

Neither is a measurement, and we have not verified a specific pair of model numbers ourselves. It is reporting, from four years ago, about a practice said to recur. That is why it sits in the claims below labelled as reported rather than official, and it is worth knowing before you treat it as a law of nature.

What follows from it, though, is not speculative at all, because the retailers wrote it themselves. A model number that exists at one shop cannot satisfy an identity test that requires it to exist at another. The price match is not refused so much as unreachable. How-To Geek put it plainly: sets with unique model numbers “don’t qualify for price-match guarantees”.

The number that is missing is the price history

The sharper point is the one Market Realist quoted from DealNews’ Benjamin Glaser, reported by NBC News: a brand-new model lets a seller “artificially inflate the price and exaggerate the discount because there’s technically no price history for that product”.

That is the same hole we described in what a crossed-out price has to have been. A former price is supposed to be one the item actually sold at, openly, for a reasonable period. A model that first existed three weeks ago has no such period, so the higher number is unfalsifiable rather than false.

Three checks, in the order they cost you time

1. Read the model number, then search it. Not the marketing name on the shelf edge — the string in the specifications. If nothing outside the retailer’s own site discusses it, no reviewer has tested what you are buying.
2. Look for evidence it existed before the sale. How-To Geek’s suggestion is a date-limited search: if the model has no footprint before the autumn, it is new to the world, not new to you.
3. Check whether reviews on the listing are for this model. Ratings are frequently pooled across a family, so a strong average can belong to a set with more ports and a faster panel than the one in your basket.

None of this makes a derivative model a bad television. It makes it an unreviewed one at a price nobody can check, which is a different purchase from the one most people think they are making. If the price suits you on its own terms, buy it on its own terms — and know that the price match is off anyway for twelve days.