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Beware of Black Friday deals that aren’t really bargains

(WFLA) – Ready, set, shop. Black Friday deals are coming, but studies show the big savings may not be that big of a bargain.

NerdWallet.com studied Black Friday pricing and found some stores play games with pricing to make sales look bigger than they are. The stores will list an “original price” or a “comp price” that doesn’t really exist.

“I think these kind of pricing tricks still persist and so it’s something that consumers need to be aware of,” Courtney Jespersen with NerdWallet.com said.

The study also shows some retail stores are just recycling old deals. At least 32 retailers repeated at least one Black Friday deal from 2015 in 2016, the study found.

The website shared basic advice to help shoppers before Black Friday. “Before sales start, compare prices among multiple retailers and from the same retailer to locate the lowest price and gain a better sense for the true original price of a given product. If you shop a pre-Black Friday sale, always compare the sale prices to the retailer’s Black Friday ad,” NerdWallet says.

“Many legitimate deals are available in such limited quantities that they’ll likely be sold out before most shoppers even make it through the front door. Select a handful of worthwhile deals that you think you have a chance at scoring,” according to the site.

There are other tools consumers can use to fight back. The sites camelcamelcamel.com and SlickDeals.com track pricing on a wide variety of items. Consumers can use these websites to track pricing history and to find out if a deal really is a deal.

At Walmart, store manager Aaron Powell said they have plenty of Black Friday deals that really are savings. “Every department in the store will have something in the ad that will actually be cheaper than buying it regular,” Powell said.

He maintained Walmart does not raise prices before sales. “At Walmart, we actually have have a baseline on everything like that, so our prices are true savings on the items,” Powell said.