Who has the time (or money) for deals?

Philip Brewer — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:00:03 +0000

I pay almost no attention to "deals" sites. I scarcely even read the lists of deals here on Wise Bread. There are several reasons, but they pretty much come down to two things: I don't have the time, or the money, to pay attention to deals.

In the abstract, deals are great. And, of course, actual concrete deals that you can use are even better. My wife, who does most of our grocery shopping, gets the grocery store fliers and plans shopping trips around what's cheap at the nearby places where we're going to buy our groceries anyway. But I think that's key: deals only save you money if they let you pay less for stuff you were going to buy anyway.

Lists of random deals, though, don't provide that. In fact, I find a list of random deals is usually just a big waste of time — because it consists almost entirely of things that I had no plan to buy.

In practice, it's even worse than that: a list of random deals is (and is intended to be) a temptation to buy stuff I don't need. After all, that's the whole point of deals.

The only good result from spending time trawling through deal lists is the happy coincidence of finding exactly what you were going to buy at an especially good price. The usual result — finding nothing I need — means that it was a big waste of time. The other possible result — finding something that I wasn't going to buy, but that's so attractive I end up buying it anyway — is a big waste of money.

I do sometimes go the other way around — decide that I want to buy something and then look around for a great deal. The companies that offer deals, of course, try pretty hard to make that effort unsuccessful. After all, the point of the deal is not to save you money, it's to get you so spend money that you otherwise wouldn't have. Once you've decided to spend the money, there's no point in giving you a deal.

The internet is a useful tool for finding a good price, once you've decided to buy something. It's more useful for finding ordinary low prices, though, rather than great deals. Happily, that turns out to be more useful to me than lists of deals.

This article is from Philip Brewer of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

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Who has the time (or money) for deals?