You can find Black Friday deals pretty much everywhere.
But buyers beware. Whether it’s 40% to 70% off on the sales price, experts will tell you most of those deals are not legitimate.
“Most retailers these days, just continuously offer sales off prices that they rarely ever charge,” said Kevin Brasler with Washington Consumers’ Checkbook.
He said retailers are notorious for using sophisticated marketing tricks to convince consumers to buy now and spend more.
“The most important thing to keep in mind is that the lowest price of the year or that it’s a Black Friday deal, don’t believe it. Don’t believe it’s a low price unless you do a little shopping around,” Brasler said.
Brasler advises consumers that are still not sure about a purchase to shop around or even wait.
“Another important thing to keep in mind, especially during the holiday season, is that a lot of retailers will try to rush you in making a decision. They may say, ‘oh, this price is only going to be good for 24 hours or for this weekend or for this week.’ Don’t buy into that,” Brasler said.
Brasler said most retailers will still offer those discounts even when the holidays are over.
Consumers’ Checkbook’s researchers spent 33 weeks tracking sale prices at 24 major retailers and found that most stores’ discount claims aren’t really discounts at all, but attempts to mislead.
Nearly all of the 24 stores they tracked were guilty of some sales-price duplicity, advertising sales for the majority of the items Consumers’ Checkbook checked more than half of the time.
Twenty two of the retailers, as a group, marked their items “on sale” about 70% of the time, on average. So overall, far more often than not, they promoted prices as discounts that weren’t really special.
