Why I Check Price History Charts Before Every Post

Every deal I post has a chart behind it that never makes it onto the site. Before a single listing goes up, I pull the price history for that exact product and look at where it’s actually been — not the number sitting next to a strikethrough on the product page, the number the listing has actually sold at, day by day, for months. Most of what I check never gets posted, because the chart tells a different story than the page does. This is about what that story usually is, and why I don’t trust a “was” price until I’ve seen it for myself.

The gap between the sticker and the truth

I’m not the only one who’s stopped taking “on sale” at face value. A CivicScience survey found that only 23% of consumers now believe items marked “on sale” are actually discounted most of the time — which means roughly three out of four shoppers have already learned, the hard way, that the label and the reality don’t reliably match.

They’re right not to trust it. Consumers’ Checkbook spent 24 weeks in 2025 tracking prices on 25-plus items across 25 major retailers and found that 21 of them advertised a “sale” price more than half the time — with the worst offenders (Bass Pro Shops, Bed Bath & Beyond, Dick’s, Foot Locker, Gap, JCPenney, Michaels, Nordstrom, Old Navy, and Wayfair among them) keeping items marked down almost constantly. Only three retailers in the whole study — Apple, Costco, and Dell — ran discounts that behaved the way a discount is supposed to: occasional, and off a price that actually held. When something is “on sale” nine days out of ten, the sale isn’t the event. The full price is the fiction.

That’s not a moral failing on retailers’ part so much as it is math. A reference price only means something if it’s the price people actually paid. The FTC’s own Guides Against Deceptive Pricing (16 CFR Part 233) say exactly that: a former price is a legitimate basis for a discount claim only if it’s “the actual, bona fide price at which the article was offered to the public on a regular basis for a reasonably substantial period of time” — not a number that existed for a day or two just to make the “sale” price look bigger by comparison. A discount measured against a price nobody ever paid isn’t a discount. It’s a magic trick with the same number doing double duty as both the rabbit and the hat.

Why I look at the chart instead of the sticker

Here’s what I’m actually watching for when I pull a price history before deciding whether something’s worth posting. I’m not going to turn this into a tutorial on reading every chart type — that’s not really the point of this account, and honestly, if I handed you the exact method, there’d be no reason for you to trust the outcome over just doing it yourself every time. What I do think is worth explaining is the shape of the three patterns that tell me a “sale” is manufactured, because once you know what they look like, you’ll never read a strikethrough price the same way again.

The pre-sale spike. The most common pattern is a price that jumps — sometimes just days before a “deal” goes live — and then the “discount” is measured against that freshly inflated number instead of what the item actually sold for the month before. Seen on a chart, it’s obvious: a flat line for weeks, a sudden spike right before the event, then a drop to a price that’s often close to or even above where the flat line already was. The visual effect on the product page is a big red percentage. The reality is that the price barely moved, if it moved at all — it just got a running start.

The stable parallel offer nobody points you to. Sometimes the “new low price!” on the main listing isn’t new at all — there’s a second offer on the same product, maybe a different condition or a different seller, sitting at a lower price that’s been flat and unremarkable for months. The “discount” being advertised is really just the primary listing catching up to a price that was already boring and stable somewhere else on the same page. That’s not a deal happening — it’s marketing catching up to a number that was true the whole time.

The struck-through MSRP. A lot of “was” prices aren’t a past selling price at all — they’re the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, a number the manufacturer recommends and nobody is obligated to charge. MSRP is explicitly a suggestion, not a market price: retailers are legally free to price above or below it, and plenty of items never sell anywhere near it, ever. Putting a line through an MSRP and calling the gap a “discount” compares today’s price to a number that was never really in circulation, which is a different failure mode from the pre-sale spike but lands in the same place — a comparison against a price that isn’t real.

All three patterns do the same job: they give a shopper a bigger, more impressive-looking gap between “before” and “now” than actually exists. None of them are illegal on their own — a retailer can set whatever MSRP or list price it wants — but none of them are a real discount either, and the only way to tell the difference is to look at where the price has actually sat over time, not what’s printed next to it today.

None of this means every “was” price is fake, either. Plenty of the discounts I check turn out to be exactly what they claim — a price that held for weeks, then genuinely dropped. The point isn’t that retailers are lying every time. It’s that “was” and “sale” have stopped being reliable signals on their own, so the number next to the strikethrough has to earn its place the same way any other claim does: by matching what actually happened, not what a page says happened. That’s a low bar in theory. In practice, checking it against real history is the part almost nobody does before they buy.

What actually earns a post here

When a chart doesn’t show one of those three patterns — when the “before” price is one the item genuinely sold at for a real stretch of time, and the drop is against that — that’s the bar I use before anything goes up on this site. It’s the same bar behind the LG UltraGear 27GX700A-B monitor deal I posted recently: I checked where that panel had actually sold over 300-plus days before calling the price a real low, not just what the strikethrough claimed. If you want to see what that looks like across a whole category, the monitor deals and smart home deals I’ve posted are both built the same way — checked against history first, written up second.

I’d genuinely rather lose a post than publish a fake discount with a straight face. That’s less a slogan than a description of what happens on my end most days: most of what I check gets quietly dropped, not written up, because the chart didn’t back up the sticker. The stuff that does make it through isn’t lucky — it’s just the stuff that was already true before I looked.

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Sources: FTC Guides Against Deceptive Pricing, 16 CFR Part 233, Consumers’ Checkbook’s “Sale Fail” study, eMarketer on CivicScience’s survey on trust in “sale” claims, PriceShape’s glossary explanation of MSRP.