Walmart’s Black Friday sale opens on November 12 this year, at midnight Eastern, but only if you pay for Walmart+. Everyone else waits. That one detail tells you more about how Black Friday doorbusters work in 2026 than any circular will. The giveaway price on a TV was never really about the TV. It was about getting you to do something else. For decades that something was walking into the store. Now, more and more, it’s signing up.
A doorbuster is an advertising expense with a price tag on it
Economists call it a loss leader: a product sold at or below cost so that its price can do the work an ad would otherwise do. The classic study of this comes from Judith Chevalier, Anil Kashyap, and Peter Rossi, who went through about seven and a half years of weekly scanner data from Dominick’s, a Chicago grocery chain. Their paper, published through the National Bureau of Economic Research and later in the American Economic Review in 2003, asked a simple question. Why don’t prices go up when demand peaks?
Basic supply and demand says they should. Turkey in November, beer before the Fourth of July. Instead, the researchers found the opposite: retail margins on beer fell around Memorial Day, the Fourth, Labor Day, and Christmas, and margins on cheese and snack crackers dropped at Thanksgiving and Christmas. The pattern fit a loss leader model better than anything else they tested. Stores pay to advertise a small number of popular items, and the most effective way to advertise them is to cut their prices exactly when the most people are shopping for them.
The scale matters here. A typical Dominick’s circular promoted about 200 of the roughly 25,000 items on the shelves, per Chicago Booth’s write-up of the research. That’s 0.8% of the store doing the advertising for the other 99.2%.
The discount is real, and the rest of your cart pays it back
Shoppers tend to assume the opposite, but doorbuster discounts usually aren’t fake. A retailer selling a TV below cost is losing money on that TV, which is exactly why the quantities are small and the hours are odd. The loss is the cost of getting you there.
What earns it back is everything else. On a $1,000 basket, the store doesn’t care very much which $1,000 it is, as long as the total margin clears the loss on the headline item. HDMI cables, extended warranties, batteries, wrapping paper, the second item you hadn’t planned on. Electronics retailers have run on this logic for years because the TVs themselves carry thin margins and the add-ons carry fat ones. It’s the same reason cash back portals can afford to pay you to shop: somebody further down the chain is collecting more than you’re getting back. (We traced that money in our piece on how cash back portals make money.)
So the doorbuster is a fair trade if you buy only the doorbuster. It stops being one the moment the rest of the cart fills up at full margin.
Black Friday doorbusters had to change once people stopped lining up
The old model needed a physical door. Shoppers still come, of course. The National Retail Federation counted a record 203 million shoppers over the 2025 Thanksgiving weekend, across stores and online, and its 2026 forecast, released October 15, projects November and December sales of $1.013 trillion, up 4.2%. But a growing share of that buying happens on a phone, where there’s no endcap of $30 cables to walk past on the way to checkout.
Online, the retailer’s problem changes. Getting you to a website is cheap. Getting you to come back to it, again and again, all year, is the expensive part. The most valuable thing a doorbuster can buy online is a repeat customer, and the cleanest way to lock one in is a paid membership.
That’s what early access does. Walmart has tied early Black Friday access to Walmart+ since 2021, and this year’s member window opens November 12. The doorbuster is still a loss leader. The thing it leads to has moved from your shopping cart to your recurring card charges.
An early access sign-up can cost more than the doorbuster saves
Walmart+ costs $12.95 a month or $98 a year, according to Clark.com’s current pricing breakdown. Suppose you sign up for the monthly plan on November 11 purely to grab a doorbuster that’s $50 below its usual price on the 12th.
If you cancel in December, you paid $12.95 for $50 of savings. The deal holds up well, and the retailer knows a chunk of people will do exactly that.
The bet the retailer is making is on the people who don’t cancel. Twelve months at $12.95 comes to $155.40. That’s $57.40 more than the annual plan would have cost, and $105.40 more than the $50 you saved on the TV. If you never use the membership for anything else, your discounted TV cost you about $105 extra. If you do use it (Walmart+ includes delivery perks that some households lean on heavily), the math can come out fine. The point is that the doorbuster’s honest price includes whatever subscription you picked up to reach it.
Derivative models make the “was” price impossible to check
There’s one more piece of machinery behind many Black Friday doorbusters, and it’s the hardest to see. Federal rules govern how a store can advertise a discount. The FTC’s Guides Against Deceptive Pricing, at 16 CFR 233.1, say a former price has to be one the item was “openly and actively offered for sale, for a reasonably substantial period of time,” honestly and in good faith. A store can’t invent a “was $1,499” for an item it never sold at $1,499.
But a model that didn’t exist last month has no former price to check. These are often called derivative models: versions built or renumbered for the holiday season. NBC News, reporting on The Wirecutter’s research, described a Black Friday Vizio 58-inch set with 10 local dimming zones and a 60Hz panel, compared with 32 zones and 120Hz on the regular M-Series. Consumer Reports’ Jim Willcox told NBC that the approach “makes it harder for shoppers to do direct price comparisons,” and noted that price-match guarantees usually apply only to the identical model.
A derivative TV isn’t automatically a bad buy. It’s a different product at a lower price, and sometimes that’s exactly what you want. It just means the discount percentage on the tag can’t be verified, because there was never a regular price to discount from.
A doorbuster’s real price is the whole transaction
Retailers don’t judge a doorbuster on its own margin, so you shouldn’t judge it on its own discount. The question that matters is what the whole transaction costs you: the item, whatever else ends up in the cart, and any membership you joined to get in early. Look up the model number before you buy. If the only results are holiday ads and no reviews, it’s probably a derivative, and the “was” price tells you nothing.
The odd thing about Black Friday doorbusters is that the store usually is losing money on the item. It plans to make that money back from you somewhere else. In 2026, that somewhere else is more and more often a $12.95 line on your February card statement.
