Black Friday deals look so good that they just might be too good to be true.

The day after Thanksgiving - or in some cases, Thanksgiving Day - marks the beginning of the holiday shopping rush and people from all over the nation will be flocking to the stores with hopes of buying as much as possible at the lowest price.

However, these so-called low prices might not always be as advertised. Suzanne Kapner wrote about this in a piece for the Wall Street Journal, saying that "big retailers work backward with their suppliers to set starting prices that, after all the markdowns, will yield the profit margins they want."

"A lot of the discount is already priced into the product," Liz Dunn, an analyst at Macquarie Equities Research, said to Kapner. "That's why you see much more stable margins."

Mark Cohen, who serves as a professor at Columbia's Business School and has a great deal of experience in the industry dating back to when he was the CEO of Sears Canada, echoed those words.

"The silliness of it all is that the original price from which the discount is computed is often specious to begin with, because items hardly ever sell at that price, which makes the discount less legitimate," he said.

In the end, it is best to do some research before you dive into the stores for deals that may only exist to exploit the customer. Regardless, plenty of holiday shoppers will be so anxious to get into the stores that there will not even be any time for that.