Bargain hunting a full-time job this holiday season

Michelle Schaefer and her family wouldn't have much of a Christmas without deals.

The mother of six looks for discounts everywhere, mostly on the Internet. She scours frugal-shopper blogs, finds Facebook discounts and searches store sales.

Schaefer needs to save the most money she can. Medical bills have stacked up. Her husband, the sole source of income for her and their two sons, took a pay cut with the new job he started in September.

"I have, like, a $50 budget per kid," she said of her sons and four daughters from a previous marriage. "Of course, you can't tell your kids, 'We're not having Christmas this year.' We're already spending an incredibly small amount of money on them as it is."

Even for consumers less cash-strapped than Schaefer, holiday shopping has become synonymous with bargain-hunting. Especially this year, with the remnants of the recession squeezing consumers' budgets and retailers hawking discounts in stores, online and even on mobile phones, few shoppers seem willing to pay full price.

"There's no longer a full-retail-price customer in America," said Britt Beemer, founder of America's Research Group, a marketing and consumer behavior consulting firm. "Americans today have less money. They have a lot less time. And they want to save money wherever they can."

During recent years of economic decline, retailers have struggled to attract shoppers into their stores.

"Promotions have been pretty much the only thing that's been found to work," said Nikki Baird, managing partner of Retail Systems Research, a retail technology consulting firm.

The day after Thanksgiving, known as Black Friday, has long been the focal point of retailers' deepest discounts. This year, they began touting Black Friday-esque offers weeks earlier.

With images of snowflakes and ornaments on its e-mail alert, Best Buy pitched a "Shop Early Save Big Event" the first weekend in November.

Walmart announced an electronics sale for the same days, describing it in its news release as "the first of many consumer electronics savings events for the 2010 holiday season" and citing low prices for television sets, laptop computers and a video game system.

It's all part of an attempt to lure shoppers in a season projected to bring the highest sales increase in three years.

The National Retail Federation, the retail industry's largest U.S. trade group, forecast that sales for November and December will climb 2.3 percent this year to $447.1 billion - just below the average increase over the past 10 years but up from flat sales in 2009 and a 3.9 percent drop in 2008.

"Everybody is extremely price conscious," said Margie Johnson, a national retail consultant based in Virginia Beach. "If it's really a compelling offer, they're responding to it."

Schaefer spends late evenings and early mornings on her computer. She has an account on the social-networking site Facebook and a long Favorites list of coupon blog sites such as ClipperGirl and Passionate Penny Pincher.

For her, holiday shopping started as soon as she saw deals for items on her list.

On a group-buying website called Eversave, she bought a gift certificate that cost $12 for $35 worth of toys on Wild Dill, an online store that specializes in organic and natural products. When Schaefer registered her e-mail address at Wild Dill, she got another $2 off. At a blog site called DealSeekingMom.com, she found a coupon code for Wild Dill that saved her another $5.

"So I got $35 worth of toys for 5 bucks," Schaefer said last week from her kitchen table in Chesapeake. "Then, it doesn't even end there."

She posted the Eversave deal on her Facebook page, and a friend clicked on it. That gave her another $20 credit to use on Eversave. She applied that to another Eversave deal - $15 for a gift package of nuts worth $43.

For her young sons, she planned to buy classic games such as Chutes and Ladders and Candy Land. When games went on sale at Toys R Us for $3 each, Schaefer found a rebate from manufacturer Hasbro for $2 per game. "So I'll actually get these games for $1 each."

On another group-buying site called Jasmere, which drops prices lower for an item as more consumers sign up for the deal, a coupon costing $11 bought her a $26 tin of peppermint cookies.

Another mom's blog, Couponing to Disney, alerted Schaefer to an additional $5 off Jasmere purchases, so she got the tins for $6 each and can ship them when she chooses. She bought them for her sisters for Christmas, with free gift wrap.

She also found an online coupon for $10 off sleepwear at Target, which also happened to have that category on sale.

"I always get my kids a new pair of pajamas for Christmas," Schaefer said.

Today's bargain-seeker has to have a smattering of technological know-how, an understanding of the online universe and insight into the way retailers are reaching customers.

Schaefer knows, for example, that if she goes to manufacturer's Facebook page and clicks to "Like" its products, she can get those products for free or at a discount.

"It's like this tsunami, if you will, of offers," Johnson said. "There are so many ways to deliver the deal that it's just making people deal-dizzy."

Retailers are stepping up their use of technology. Most major chains, as well as many small merchants, have found ways to reach their customers through Facebook and Twitter, Baird said.

A few, such as J.C. Penney and Starbucks, have experimented with text-messaging, sending daily deals to consumers' mobile phones. Competition will force other retailers to do the same soon, Baird said.

"They're getting much smarter about what offers are stimulating a response," Baird said. "You've got to be where your customers are, and your customers are starting out online."

Foursquare, Shopkick and other location-based applications have emerged as the next frontier of discounted shopping. With Foursquare, shoppers can "check in" at a store through their mobile phone, and some retailers offer them deals for doing so.

Sports Authority has planned a Foursquare promotion for Black Friday. Customers who "check in" at its stores between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. and post their location on Twitter will enter a random drawing to receive a $500 gift card.

"This year's sort of the Facebook/Twitter year," Baird said. "And next year has the potential to be mobile."

With her tight budget, Schaefer realizes she faces limits to her deal access. If she had a smartphone, she concedes, she could take advantage of Foursquare offers. For now, she said, the cost to upgrade to a smartphone outweighs the savings she'd expect.

Schaefer also realizes that she trades some amount of privacy for her deal-seeking. Each site involves registration of at least an e-mail address. Each online purchase records her name, address and debit card number linked to her bank account - since she decided to cut up her credit cards.

None of that stops her, though, from grabbing all the money-saving opportunities she can. Schaefer recalled past holidays, before she learned the art of the online deal, when her family received gifts from dollar stores or donated by others.

"They're going to do better this year," she said. "They're going to get better-quality stuff."

Carolyn Shapiro, (757) 446-2270, carolyn.shapiro@pilotonline.com