Is it just me or have we seen a serious plunge in deals available over the past say 4 years?

Remember the radio shaack FRS radios? Buy the thing for $12 and get a $25 rebate?

Free after rebate PREPAID Cellular phones from almost every carrier?

Compussr deals almost a dozen freebies every week?

Rebates that actually came in back then..

Great deals at Staplez, Orchard Subply Hardware, Sears, even Kmart virtually every holiday?

And YES, actually standing in line at Worst Buy to get a good deal on some computer game, computer or system?

Is it just me growing up or have many if not most of the deals virtually vanished into thin air?

Discuss amongst yourselves, I'll check back in a few.

HPMaster

After so much abuse companies stop offering those things. They do it to get people in the door to purchase other stuff but instead 10,000 fatwallet members purchase 98% of there merchandise and nothing else. Then half of those people put it on eBay for profit.

People aren't buying the high margin items as much, so offering loss leaders to get people interested isn't viable.

I have noticed a significant drop compared to last year. Four years ago, I could barely keep up. I agree with the comment by momolaughs and very eloquently stated by fivetalents. Every time that FW or SD made the national news I cringed because I knew that it would change the rules. We used to be a small community of people sharing information about where to find bargains and discounts. The community kept growing and attracting people that did not share the same goals. Their primary goal was profit.

It got so bad that the original poster did benefit from his/her own post because within minutes the deal was posted on every deal site online. E-tailers stopped honoring price and coupon mistakes, they stopped stopped allowing for great deals when they had 200,000 people trying to purchase the same item. They instead killed it within minutes and canceled orders. Staples used to send out great coupons, somebody thought it would be a great idea to clone them and sell them. The freebies were everywhere but, instead of getting one, some people decided to use 20 different email addresses and get 20. Dell's outlet used to have great bargains, somebody decided to write a script to catch all of the cheap systems.

So, the great deal posters stopped posting. Joker and many others, we stopped being a community. The economy changed and there is no longer competition from mass store closings. The feds started giving out checks to banks and businesses that have no business savvy, CEOs lined their pockets and ran good businesses into the ground, it never dawned on them that, in a weak economy to simply lower their prices and cut back on extravagances. Circuit City's ads alone cost a small fortune every week.

Therefore, the deal game is officially dead. A moment of silence please. It was killed off by greed.

I noticed the hottest deals were when retailers over-estimated the economy and got stuck with surplus merchandise that they HAD to move - and a lot of others had merchandise they had to move as well. Since then, retailers have scaled back dramatically or found new ways of offering things like carrying an item "online only" and shipping it to the store after you buy it. Deals disappear when they don't have surplus - supply v. demand. I suspect retailers remain cautious this year too.