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Daily deal sites: Beware these five things

Daily deal sites offer substantial discounts on everything from restaurant meals and kids' clothes to car detailing and getaways – if you're careful and read the fine print.

5. Deals may be a farce

Mike Spencer/The Star-News/AP/File
Delly Mellor, of Delly's Deals, thumbs through a binder full of coupons that she carries on her grocery shopping trips at her home in Wilmington, N.C. To check out a daily online deal, use the Internet to find out what the item normally sells for.

  • By David Bakke Contributor

Just because an offer is advertised as being a deal doesn't mean that it truly is a deal. For example, if you're considering a deal for a discount on merchandise, do a simple Internet search to see what the item sells for at face value. You may find that an advertised 40 percent savings may be for an item whose price has been inflated 50 percent.

For the most part, daily deal websites can save you oodles of money. Just be sure you know exactly what you're buying, how much it would cost otherwise, and that you can use it before it expires. Always be sure you purchase deals for items that you would otherwise buy. If you get into the habit of making impulse purchases on items you don't really want or need, you could find yourself rapidly falling into debt.

Have you had any issues with daily deal websites?

– David Bakke always looks for ways to shop smart and save as much money as possible. He shares his finding and tips on the website, MoneyCrashers.com.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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