Blu-ray Decks, 32-inch TVs, Priced Aggressively as Christmas Nears

CE retailers with brick-and-mortar locations are pulling out the stops with last-minute shopping deals five days before Christmas, we found through viewing email blasts and a scan of websites Thursday. A day after ShopperTrak projected that Saturday would be the highest grossing day of 2012 at retail stores, retailers turned up the noise a notch hoping to snare procrastinators and deal hunters.

In TVs, sub-$200 32-inch TV prices that turned heads during Black Friday sales returned for countdown-to-Christmas sales. Walmart showed $199 JVC and $197 Sceptre TVs at savings of $29 and $53, while hhgregg splashed $199 deals for 32-inch models from Proscan, Curtis and Seiki. An upgrade to a Sceptre 1080p from 720p only costs Walmart customers an additional $12, according to the website.

Hhgregg blasted its online customer list with a “Last Chance for Holiday Shipping” email Thursday promoting 25-percent-off deals and an extra 5 percent off purchases above $499 made with an hhgregg credit card. A Samsung 32-inch 720p LED-lit LCD TV was priced $279, a $100 discount, but availability was limited depending on location, according to the website. We found the TV available via in-store or through shipping at five ZIP codes around the country. Among other highlighted electronics deals at hhgregg were a 39-inch Samsung UN39EH5003 LCD TV discounted by $99.96 to $399 in-store only and “limited to warehouse quantities.” A Samsung Galaxy 16 GB 10-inch tablet took a 25 percent cut to $299, we found, while a Coby 4 GB 7-inch Android 4.0 tablet was dropped $20 to $79 in-store only. Samsung’s 10-inch 16 GB Galaxy Note was trimmed 10 percent to $449 and available in-store or online. The LG 55LS4500 LED-lit TV listed at hhgregg for $849.99, a price matched by Best Buy and Sears, while Walmart came in a buck lower and Amazon came in at $816.99 for the same model.

Barnes & Noble, already running a free $20 gift card promotion with MasterCard (CED Nov 27 p6) in stores only through Friday, has added a buy-one-gift-one promotion, also through Dec. 21 on e-books. We found the offer to be bit of a stretch, given that buyers were required to go into a store to select from a list of books that would end up being gifted electronically and to a friend within 24 hours. Twenty titles are part of the promotion (http://bit.ly/VbKn2l) including The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lucky One, by Nicholas Sparks, Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, any of the The Hunger Games trilogy titles by Suzanne Collins, and America Again: Re-Becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t, by Stephen Colbert. Children’s books that can be gifted with the promotion include The Third Wheel (Diary of a Wimpy Kid Series #7), by Jeff Kinney, The Brave Read-Along Storybook, from Disney, The Light Between Oceans, by M.L. Stedman and The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. E-book prices range from $3.99 to $13.74, according to the website. Gift recipients don’t need a Nook hardware device to read the e-book from Barnes & Noble, according to the fine print. They can use a Nook reading app on an iOS, Android, or Windows 8 device, it said.

Best Buy used the dubious lure of “free store pickup” on its last-minute deals page Thursday, and a call to customer service confirmed that pick-up is always free for orders paid for online. The customer service rep, John, told us we'd have eight days to pick up a product that we paid for today if we chose the store pick-up option, and after eight days the product would go back on the shelves and our money would be refunded. Among its TV deals, Best Buy cut the price of the Samsung UN32EH4003FXZA 32-inch LED-lit TV by $100 to $279 and stripped the LG 47-inch 47LS4500 by $70 to bring it to $579, the website said.

Target shot out a last-minute email blast on Thursday (http://bit.ly/Yq1oNy) promoting deals good through Christmas Eve. CE products in the Target spotlight included an Element 40-inch 1080p TV, cut by $70 to $279 and a 16 GB iPod Nano selling at full price for $149 but with a $20 Target gift card tossed in. The $20 gift cards are also rewards for buyers of the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, no longer in short supply, which is selling at the full $119.99 price, and the standard Simple Touch that’s been marked down by Barnes & Noble to $79 from $99. Target’s fine print said terms and conditions apply to gift cards but those terms weren’t positioned nearby. A Westinghouse 32-inch LED-lit LCD TV was cut $50 to $199, and a TomTom GPS unit with free lifetime map updates was chopped by $75 to $94.99, the ad said. Shoppers can get a 50-inch Philips connected TV for $579.99 at Target, saving $120, the mailer said.

Blu-ray players continue to be some of the best 2012 bargains at low-two-digit prices. At Target, two Panasonic Blu-ray players were slashed by $30 to $59.99 for a basic model and to $89.99 for a Wi-Fi version, according to the ad. Best Buy took $40 off the price of a Toshiba BDX3300 bringing it to $59.99, while a Sony 3D Wi-Fi Blu-ray player fell by $50 at Best Buy to $99.99.