Every shopping season brings the same visual language: a slashed-through 'original' price, a bold percentage-off badge, and a countdown clock ticking toward urgency. That presentation is designed to make you decide fast. But the price being crossed out is often the least regulated, least verified number on the page. Before you treat any discount as real money saved, it helps to understand where that reference price comes from and how to check it yourself.
What a 'was' price is actually supposed to mean
In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission's Guides Against Deceptive Pricing say a former price used for comparison should be one at which the item was openly and actively offered for sale, for a reasonably substantial period, in the recent past — not a price invented or inflated just to make a markdown look bigger. The guidance is not a strict numerical formula, which is part of the problem: enforcement is case-by-case, and retailers have wide latitude in how they interpret 'reasonably substantial.'
The European Union closed some of that gap with its 2022 Omnibus Directive update to consumer protection rules, which requires traders advertising a price reduction to disclose the lowest price charged in the 30 days before the discount began. That single rule is why many EU and EU-facing retailers now show a small 'lowest price in the last 30 days' line under a sale price — it's a legal disclosure, not a courtesy.
The UK's Chartered Trading Standards Institute pricing practices guidance follows a similar principle: a discount should be measured against a price that was genuinely available to consumers, and short-lived 'was' prices set just before a sale to inflate the apparent saving are considered misleading.
The core rule of thumb
If a retailer can't show the item sold at the 'original' price for a meaningful stretch of time, the percentage-off badge is marketing, not math.
How to check the real price history yourself
You don't have to take a badge's word for it. A few habits catch most inflated discounts:
- Look for a built-in price-history disclosure (common on EU sites since 2022) and read the actual date range it covers, not just the headline percentage.
- Use an independent price-tracking tool or browser extension that logs a product's price over months, not just the last few days, so you can see whether the 'sale' price is close to what the item normally costs anyway.
- Check the retailer's own site history if possible — many stores' cached pages or wayback-style archives show what an item was actually listed at weeks earlier.
- Search the exact model number or SKU on a second retailer to see whether the 'special' price is simply the market rate everywhere.
