Daily deal sites: Beware these five things

Daily deal sites offer substantial discounts on everything from restaurant meals and kids' clothes to car detailing and getaways – if you're careful and read the fine print.

3. Availability can be limited

Al Behrman/AP/File
Chef Paul Kendall, right, demonstrates cooking techniques while Pegg, left, and Dick Bisher look on during a cooking class at a Learning Kitchen in West Chester, Ohio. The Learning Kitchen has used Groupon and Foursquare for mobile marketing.

Let's say a small auto-detailing business in your area offers an 80 percent discount on its service. If the coupon is well received, the shop may get so much response that it can't schedule all the appointments in the necessary time frame. If that's the case, you may be out of luck – unless the vendor extends the window of opportunity. If you find a deal that's particularly attractive or popular, contact the business first for appointment options.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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