You grab a cart, walk through those automatic doors, and immediately the signs start screaming at you. “SALE!” “LIMITED TIME OFFER!” “MEMBER EXCLUSIVE SAVINGS!” It feels like the store is doing you a favor. Honestly, for most shoppers, those signs feel like a small victory in a world of relentlessly rising food prices.
But here’s the thing. What looks like a deal is often anything but. Consumer researchers, legal experts, and watchdog organizations have been documenting these tactics for years, and their findings are genuinely unsettling. Let’s dive in.
1. The “Perpetual Sale” That Was Never Actually a Sale
Picture this: a bright yellow tag screaming “SALE” hangs on a product shelf every single week, every month, practically year-round. If something is always on sale, it was never really on sale. That’s not a discount. That’s just the price.
Nonprofit Consumers’ Checkbook researchers tracked prices at 25 major retailers for six months and found that most advertised discounts are bogus, with stores increasingly using fake sales to mislead consumers. Their findings were striking.
Over ten years, fake sales have become far more prevalent. During their 2018 project, six retailers offered at least half of the items tracked at fake discounts more than half the time. By their most recent study, far more stores, specifically 21 out of 25, advertised sale prices more than half the time.
This practice, called “fictitious pricing,” is widespread in the retail trade. One recent investigation tracked prices at 25 major retailers and found that most stores’ sale prices are bogus discounts because the listed regular price is seldom, if ever, the actual price charged for the products.
Think of it like a store permanently putting a “fresh batch” sign over fruit that has been sitting there for days. The sign creates a feeling. The reality is something else entirely. Stores run these special-but-not-really-special discounts and sale prices to manipulate shoppers into buying items immediately, out of fear that prices will soon go back up. These fake sales also discourage comparison shopping, because if something is already marked down significantly, why bother looking elsewhere?
Fifty years ago, the Federal Trade Commission stopped enforcing deceptive pricing regulations, assuming competition would keep retailers honest. Since then, competition has increased significantly, yet the practice of posting false, inflated comparison prices alongside sale prices has continued unchecked.
2. The “Loyalty Card Price” That Was Artificially Inflated First
Scan your loyalty card and save a dollar fifty. Sounds great, right? But what if that dollar fifty “savings” only exists because the store quietly raised the non-member price before ever putting it on promotion? That’s the concern that consumer researchers and regulators have been raising with growing urgency.
In recent years, there has been a growing trend in the use of loyalty pricing by supermarkets, offering exclusive discounts to customers who sign up to loyalty schemes. However, this practice has raised growing concerns among stakeholders and consumers about fairness and the potential creation of a two-tier pricing system.
A sizeable portion of shoppers, about four in ten, do not trust that the loyalty price is a genuine saving on the usual price for the product. A significant proportion of grocery shoppers consider it unfair that lower prices are only available to loyalty scheme members. Over half of grocery shoppers think that non-member prices during a loyalty price promotion are generally higher than the price usually charged for the product.
It’s a clever psychological trap. Some stores raise the regular prices so loyalty discounts look bigger than they really are. Without the card, you pay more than you should. With the card, you feel like you’re winning. It creates the illusion of a deal while the store maintains healthy profit margins, and in some cases the discounted price is still higher than other stores’ regular prices.
Data from retail research firm 84.51° shows that roughly seven in ten consumers in late 2024 reported looking for sales, deals, and coupons more often, up from about six in ten at the start of that same year. Stores know this and they are building their pricing systems around that anxiety. The loyalty card becomes a tool of reassurance, not genuine savings.
3. The “Price Hike Before the Sale” Trick Used by Major Grocery Chains
This one is perhaps the most brazen of the three, and it has actually landed major retailers in legal hot water across multiple countries. The setup is almost comically simple: raise the price of a product, wait a few weeks, then slash it back down and call it a sale. The “original” price you’re now supposedly saving from? It was invented.
Australia’s consumer watchdog agency filed two separate lawsuits against grocery chains Woolworths and Coles, accusing the retailers of making misleading claims about illusory discounts by charging more for hundreds of products and calling it a sale. The watchdog alleged that the country’s two biggest grocery chains held prices steady for up to two years on more than 200 products, suddenly hiked those prices, then advertised them as being on sale for prices higher than they had originally charged.
Woolworths, for example, charged a set price for a product for nearly two years. Then the price rose significantly for just three weeks, after which it was put on a long-term “sale” for a price higher than the original. It’s a masterclass in manufactured discounts.
This pattern is not unique to Australia. In the United States, it has largely been left to consumers to point out such behavior. Many have, in several recent lawsuits accusing grocery chains of raising regular prices ahead of a sale, in order to provide the illusion of a better sale price.
Imagine picking up an item on sale only to be charged full price at checkout. That is exactly what Consumer Reports says is happening at Kroger-owned stores across the country. Kroger was caught repeatedly overcharging shoppers for items that were advertised for less. Hundreds of Kroger shoppers in at least half a dozen states filed complaints about deceptive pricing.
In a recent survey, roughly two thirds of respondents said the growing cost of living has made them more desperate to find good deals, and more than seven in ten believed they were saving money by buying products on offer. That desperation is precisely what these pricing tactics exploit. The more pressure shoppers feel, the more vulnerable they become to the appearance of a deal, whether or not the deal is real.
So the next time you reach for something with a bright sale tag on the shelf, pause for just a second. Ask yourself: was this ever actually cheaper? Has it been on sale for the last three months straight? Is this a loyalty price that only exists because the regular shelf price was bumped up first? The answers might surprise you. What would you have guessed before reading this?
