Around us, it really quickly stopped being "deals on real things" and "pre-buying cheaply made crap to hit the price point". For example, most of the restauran

Around us, it really quickly stopped being "deals on real things" and "pre-buying cheaply made crap to hit the price point". For example, most of the restaurant coupons didn't apply to the real menu, and was usually a "special menu" that consisted of whatever cheap crap they could toss together for pennies (always pasta) and the worst bottle of wine they could source. After getting burned a couple times on that we never went back. The equivalent of a custom-made Black Friday TV model so Best Buy could claim "60 inch LCD TV for $199".