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Pandemic TV Demand Put Halt on Discount Selling, Says NPD’s Baker

TV set discounting fell significantly during the peak of the pandemic shopping activity in 2020, Stephen Baker, NPD vice president-industry adviser, told the virtual Display Week business conference in a prerecorded presentation streamed Monday. The “levels of promotion dropped precipitously…

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in 2020 and have fallen further in 2021,” said Baker. NPD’s point-of-sale tracking data found that 21% of TVs were sold at discount in 2020's Q2 and 22% in Q3, he said. Though the proportion of discounted TVs rose to 39% during the Q4 holiday selling season, it returned to 19% in Q1 this year, he said. NPD estimates 64% of TVs in 2019's Q2 were sold at discount, and 59% and 57% of sets sold were discounted in 2019's Q3 and Q4, respectively. In 2020 and into 2021, “there was plenty of demand, and we didn’t have to cut prices,” said Baker. “One of the reasons that average selling prices are going up is that we’re not promoting televisions quite as much.”