Generally there is no such thing as a deal when it comes to consumer electronics, you will get what you pay for...go ahead and PILE ON!
Unfortunately consumers do not understand enough about the subject to make an informed decision and the manufacturers take advantage of this by throwing numbers at them that often have no relevance on the quality and or performance of a system. BTW Dell is the king of this trick and everyone else tries to market in the same way. Another thing to keep in mind is that clone resellers make the highest margin on computers but everyone thinks they get a great deal becasue they chose the components and "built their own".
As a general rule I tell my clients to budget $1000.00 CDN for an average business class PC to be used for general office use, MS Office, such as Word, Excel and Outlook and surfing the internet. I do not know the US pricing but I know the dollar goes a lot further when it comes to consumer electronics. I guess that $700 give or take $100 should get you an average web surfing, email, word processing system, but that is for the box only and you should budget more if you require additional peripherals, like a screen, printer, etc.
I realize everyone has an opinion on this topic becasue everyone owns a PC however I sell this stuff all day long and have for 25 years. More importantly I manage these technologies and I can tell you beyond a doubt that you will get what you pay for so take my advice based on my experience. My advice is don't look for a deal, set a budget then look for hardware requirements that fit your needs. These often do not match however PM me if you find anything that you feel is suitable and I will review the specs and give you my 2 cents.
BTW in case your first thought is, well I don't run a business so maybe I can scale back a bit. Truth is home PCs on average require much more horse power becasue they are crunching games, and general office stuff and Internet is typically low processing low resource, at least in most office environments. Internet can get intensive however in an office environment Internet access usually has an acceptable use policy, content filtering and or even bandwidth/network restrictions, that prohibit the more resource intensive technologies.
Mark Koelsch mentioned refurbished as a way to go and I agree. This is one of the markets where you can get a "deal" but you have to know what you are looking for. Having said that the "deals" are usually a bulk purchase. We procure refurbished gear in bulk but we do not deal with end users, only businesses, besides you are not local for pickup. If you are interested I can PM some links to some US sources for refurbished systems that you can look at and run by me.
As for bloat, that is generally a problem with all of the manufacturers (some worse than others) but it is a problem that can be addressed with either a clean bare-bones install or a cleanup, which often takes longer.