Experts urge shoppers to beware so-called 'deals'

You're standing in line at 5 a.m. on Black Friday and a store clerk comes by waving a coupon for a sky-blue, many-megapixel digital camera. "We've got six of them. Who wants one?" People lunge for them. Do you?

Or you're in the grocery store and you see an end cap with a tall stack of name-brand toilet paper and a price. Do you fill your cart?

Meanwhile, that chocolate you like is marked "advertised special" on the drug store shelf. Now's the time to buy, right?

Experts figure you'll be drawn to how all three of those products have been presented. And it won't hurt the retailers' bottom line that you think they're on sale, even though each of these is perhaps being sold at regular price — which may not be a bad price.

But the retailers' "do-it-now" urgency could be marketing fiction. Savvy consumers can save a lot of money and still get what they want, if they watch for a variety of marketing techniques, experts told the Deseret News.

For Barry Boone, chief executive officer of currentcodes.com, headquartered in Tulsa, Okla., the secret to shopping well and saving is to avoid being impulsive. Use the tools you have to check the price elsewhere before you buy. He looks items up using the Web browser on his cell phone. If you don't have that ability, you can still make a couple of comparison calls or have someone at home hop on the Internet and check prices, he said. It pays to be skeptical.

When she sees something that seems irresistible but costs more than a couple of dollars, Karin Kunz, co-owner of PinchingYourPennies.com, based in Logan, likes to think about it first. She, too, has purchased the cute pillows that turned out not to match her decor and the video game additions she really didn't need. She, too, has wallowed in buyer's remorse. Now she tries to take the impulsiveness out of shopping. If after a breather she still wants something, chances are it's a good purchase for her, she said.

Gene Whitely-Ross, "Captain Coupon" to the scores of people he e-mails special deals he's found, offers the most basic of tips, but said people need the reminders: It's great to gather coupons and to know what you have — but if you didn't bring them with you, you have nothing.

"The number of times I have heard people say they take the time to cut coupons but then just leave them where they (lie) … it is like making money and tossing it in the trash," Whitely-Ross, of Portland, Ore., said. "Know what you have and have access to them."