Walking through a grocery store or scrolling restaurant apps, you’re bombarded with signs screaming about savings. That bright red sticker promises you’re getting a steal. The BOGO offer seems impossible to resist. Fast food chains trumpet their five dollar value meals like they’re doing you a favor.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most of these so-called deals are designed to make you spend more, not save more. Let’s be real, retailers and restaurants have perfected the art of making you feel smart about purchases that often leave your wallet lighter and your fridge fuller of food you’ll eventually toss.
The Perpetual Sale Price That Never Ends
Consumers’ Checkbook researchers spent six months tracking prices at 25 major retailers and found that the markdowns advertised by most stores aren’t special prices or savings; instead, nearly all retailers now use fake sales to mislead their customers. Think about that item you’ve been eyeing that always seems to be on sale. Beginning in February 2025, once a week for 24 weeks researchers tracked the prices offered by 25 national chains.
What they discovered was shocking. Kohl’s had eight of the nine items checked on sale more than half the time during the survey period, with four items always or almost always offered at sale prices. The so-called regular price becomes fiction, just a number inflated to make the sale price look attractive. Honestly, when something is perpetually discounted, it’s not a deal at all.
BOGO Deals With Inflated Base Prices
Buy one get one free sounds irresistible until you do the math. What you’re really getting with a BOGO deal is a 50% discount off of the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, and oftentimes, this price is artificially marked up to begin with. Burger King offered a BOGO Croissan’wich deal but charged a higher price for the sandwich than it regularly cost, MyPillow offered BOGO deal on their pillows but really just doubled the price of the first pillow, and VisionWorks offered a BOGO on eyeglasses but increased the price of the first pair by roughly 40%.
Some grocery stores raise the sale price when a product goes BOGO. Even worse, you’re buying twice as much as you need. Even when some of the items you’ve purchased in BOGO sales are used, it is often the case that the second item goes unused or is wasted altogether, and if it’s a food item, it is likely to go bad before you get around to using it.
Bulk Buying That Leads to Bulk Wasting
The warehouse store membership feels like an investment in savings. You load up on giant packages, convinced you’re beating the system. New evidence shows that the push for huge quantities of cheap, high-quality food has caused us to be more wasteful than ever, and we’re throwing away more in food waste than we are saving by buying in bulk.
Only 24% of bulk shoppers say they never waste food or products, while 38% admit they often or occasionally throw away bulk purchases. Bulk buyers throw out a whole lot more food than shoppers who buy groceries on a more frequent basis, and bulk buyers who believe they’re getting great deals on groceries are literally throwing those deals in the trash. That three-pound tub of spinach seemed smart until half of it turned to slime in your crisper drawer.
Fast Food Value Meals With Hidden Markups
A $5 meal became an industry standard in 2024, though some deals were better than others. Fast food chains rolled out value meals throughout 2024 and into 2025, positioning themselves as affordable options during tough economic times. McDonald’s launched a $5 value meal in the U.S. in 2024 in a bid to attract low-income consumers who had been cutting back on their visits.
The problem? Preparing a meal at home costs about four to six dollars per person, while eating out at a restaurant can run you fifteen to twenty dollars or more, and based on a study conducted by Kalinowski Equity Research, the difference between restaurant and grocery price inflation in August 2024 increased by 310 basis points, which is five times wider than the long-term average. Even with the value meal, you’re still paying a premium you wouldn’t spend if you cooked at home. The convenience comes with a steep markup.
AI-Powered Pricing Experiments on Grocery Delivery Apps
This one’s particularly sneaky because you can’t even see it happening. Many U.S. shoppers who order grocery deliveries through Instacart are unknowingly part of widespread AI-enabled experiments that price identical products differently from one customer to the next, sometimes by as much as 23 percent. Instacart shoppers are unknowingly enrolled in AI-enabled experiments that can charge up to 23% more for the same item ordered from the same store at the same time, and the average price variations observed in the study could cost a household of four about $1,200 per year.
In some cases, Instacart maintained the sale price of items but changed the original price, creating the impression of a larger discount. You think you’re comparison shopping, but the algorithm has already decided how much you’re worth squeezing. It’s hard to know for sure, but it seems like the platform is running experiments on your wallet.
Multi-Buy Offers With Single-Item Price Increases
Multi-buy offers like Buy One, Get One Free or three for ten dollars are designed to make you buy more than you need, and these deals often mask the fact that the single-item price has been increased – for instance, a product that usually costs three dollars might be bumped up to five dollars. You feel pressured to buy three when you only need one.
The unit price tells the real story. Always check the unit price to see if the deal is truly worth it. Sometimes that individual jar sitting on the shelf beside the multi-buy promotion actually costs less per ounce than the bundle deal. Retailers count on you being too rushed or too distracted to notice.
Restaurant Meal Deals With Shrinking Portions
31% of restaurants have reduced menu size to improve kitchen efficiency and cut waste, and trimming a salad portion from 16 ounces to 14 ounces might seem minor, but across thousands of daily orders, it can translate into significant savings. You’re paying the same price or slightly less, but you’re getting noticeably less food.
According to analysis from the data firm Circana, 29% of commercial foodservice traffic over the past 12 months is on a deal, the highest rate recorded in 50 years. Restaurants push deals aggressively because they need traffic, yet they’re simultaneously reducing what you get on the plate. The deal isn’t as generous as the marketing suggests.
Expired Sale Tags That Overcharge You at Checkout
Out-of-date sales tags resulted in an average 18.4% overcharge per item, or $1.70 extra every time it happened. You grab something with a bright yellow sale sticker, get to the register, and pay full price because nobody bothered to remove the old tag. In about half the stores visited, the price tags were mostly up to date and correct, but the stores that had the most pricing errors were the ones struggling with staffing cuts.
Understaffed stores can’t keep up with changing sale signs. Last year in California, the Albertsons grocery chain received a $3.9 million fine for overcharging customers. Most shoppers don’t notice the discrepancy or don’t bother arguing at checkout. Those small overcharges add up over time.
Loyalty Program Deals That Require Spending More
Most online clothing brands offer free shipping, with the catch that you have to meet a minimum purchase amount, often $100, to qualify, and some 58% of consumers will add additional items to their cart – often things they didn’t originally intend to purchase – just to save five to ten dollars on handling fees. The same psychology applies to grocery and restaurant loyalty deals.
You download the app, sign up for the program, and suddenly you’re buying extra items to unlock a discount or free delivery. The retailer wins because you spent more overall. The perceived savings trick your brain into thinking you came out ahead when you actually spent money you wouldn’t have otherwise.
