Sale prices that are not sales: how to spot a raised then discounted price

Every pet store runs near-permanent sales, and most of the badges are honest arithmetic against a list price. The catch is the list price itself: if it was raised last month, a 25 percent discount today can still cost more than the ordinary price did in the month before that. The badge is real. The saving is not.

The three prices of every product

Any product really has three prices: the list price the badge is worked out from, the ordinary selling price it sits at most of the year, and today's price. Only the second one matters. A genuine sale is a price clearly below the ordinary price the product has actually been selling at, sustained over weeks, not a one-day label.

How to check in ten seconds

Look at the product's history, not its badge. On this site every product page charts every tracked price since tracking began, and the price drops page ranks falls against recent prices rather than list prices. Three patterns give a fake sale away: the price rose in the weeks just before the sale started; the sale price is the same price the product sold at for most of last month; or the discount is deep but the per-pound price is still worse than a rival product with no badge at all.

Why stores do it

Badges sell. A product with a struck-through price converts better than the same product at the same final price with no badge, so the incentive to manufacture the struck-through number is built in. None of this makes a store dishonest to shop at; it just means the shopper, not the badge, has to do the comparing.

The habit that beats it

Keep a short list of the products you buy every month, note what you actually paid last time, and buy when the tracked price is at the low end of its own recent range. That is the whole method behind the stock-up verdicts on this site, explained in when to stock up on pet supplies.