Most sales are
lies. We keep
the receipts.
Here's the oldest trick in retail: quietly raise a product's price, then “discount” it back to normal and slap a big % OFF on it. It works because you can't see the real price history. ShopWatch records every price, forever — so we can tell you which “deals” are real and which are theater.
How the con works
Raise the price quietly
Weeks before a big sale, the 'regular' price creeps up. Nobody's watching, so nobody notices.
"Mark it down"
On sale day the price returns to roughly what it always was — but now there's a fat strike-through and a "40% OFF" badge next to it.
You feel the urgency
The bigger the fake discount, the harder it is to resist. The math only works because you can't see the price history. We can.
Sales that don't beat the brand's own best
Each of these brands is running a real sale right now — it's just not as deep as a discount we've already recorded from them. That's not proof of a trick; it's proof a better price has existed. Which is exactly what price history is for.
How we measure this: we compare a brand's current advertised sitewide discount against the deepest discount we've recorded from that same brand since we started tracking it. We only show a brand once we have at least a few days of history and a real gap.
No caught-in-the-act receipts today.
Good news for shoppers — the current sales aren't obviously worse than usual. Check back around the big sale events.
This gets sharper over time. We started tracking these brands only recently — as our price history deepens toward the big sale seasons, these receipts go from “worse than usual” to “this exact item was cheaper in September.” Want the receipts in your inbox the moment a real drop hits? Follow along →