Black Friday Fake Discounts: How They Work

A fake Black Friday discount is rarely a lie about the sale price. It is a claim about the price before the sale — a "was" figure the item barely sold at, a list price nobody paid, or a quietly raised price from three weeks earlier. The sale price is real. The saving is the fiction. Checking the item's recent selling price, rather than the crossed-out one, removes most of the problem.

The reference price is the whole trick

Discount advertising is a comparison, and comparisons need two numbers. Retailers control both. The sale price has to be real because customers pay it, but the reference price — the "was", the "RRP", the "compare at" — is a claim about history, and history is harder to check while standing in a shop with a phone at 8% battery.

Regulators in multiple jurisdictions have taken an interest in exactly this, and most consumer protection frameworks require that a struck-through price reflect a price genuinely charged, for a meaningful period, reasonably recently. Enforcement actions against retailers for reference pricing that failed those tests have happened in the US, the UK, the EU and Australia at various points. The rules have tightened, particularly in Europe, where sellers in many cases must state the lowest price applied in a defined prior period rather than any price they like.

The result is not the disappearance of the practice but its refinement into forms that are harder to challenge. A price that was genuinely charged for two weeks in August is a legitimate reference even if nobody bought at it. A manufacturer's suggested price is a real number even when no retailer has ever used it. The claim survives; the implication — that you are saving that amount — does not.

The five mechanisms worth recognising

The permanent sale

Some items are never sold at their reference price. The "was" is set at launch, the item goes on sale immediately, and it stays on sale indefinitely, with the crossed-out figure functioning as decoration. This is most common in furniture, jewellery, luggage and mattresses — categories with high margins, infrequent purchases, and buyers who have no basis for comparison.

The tell is the discount's consistency. If an item has shown roughly the same percentage off every time you have looked at it over several months, that percentage is not a discount. It is the price.

The pre-sale markup

A price rises in mid-October and falls in late November to a level slightly below where it sat in September. The November price is technically a discount against the October price, and the October price was genuinely charged, so the claim is defensible. The customer saves nothing against what they could have paid two months earlier.

This is why October is a structurally bad month to check prices for the purposes of November comparison, and why observation over a longer window matters. A single before-and-after snapshot cannot distinguish a real cut from a reversed markup; a couple of months of casual watching can.

The event-specific variant

A television advertised at a remarkable price carries a model number you cannot find anywhere else. It is a real product from a real manufacturer, built to a specification agreed with the retailer for the event: fewer ports, a slower panel, a cheaper stand, a thinner warranty. The price is genuinely low and the comparison against the standard model is meaningless, because it is not that model.

Derivative model numbers exist across televisions, laptops, appliances and mattresses, and they are not inherently a scam — a cheaper specification at a cheaper price is a legitimate product. The deception is only in the comparison. Check the model number against the manufacturer's own site before accepting any price claim; if it does not appear there, or appears under an "exclusive" heading, treat the price as belonging to its own category.

The bundle that prices its parts at full retail

A bundle is advertised as saving a large amount, calculated by adding up the list prices of every component. The components have street prices well below list, and several of them are things you would not have bought. The bundle is frequently still reasonable value; the stated saving is arithmetic performed on the most flattering possible inputs.

Price the components you actually want at their real individual prices, add them up, and compare that to the bundle. Anything in the bundle you would not have bought counts as zero, not as list price.

Manufactured scarcity

Countdown clocks, stock counters, "deal of the hour", and quantities that reset when you refresh the page. Genuine limited stock exists, particularly in end-of-season clearance, but on a mainstream product during a multi-week sales event the timer is a conversion device. Its purpose is to prevent exactly the checks described here, because those checks take four minutes and the timer has ninety seconds on it.

What is genuinely cheap in November

None of this means the whole event is theatre. Several categories reliably reach their annual low in the Black Friday window, because manufacturers subsidise the discounting to win volume and retailers compete on a small number of highly visible items.

Televisions, laptops, headphones, tablets, games consoles and smart home devices are the categories where November prices most often beat anything else in the year. Large appliances do well in the window too, though they compete with autumn model-year clearance. The common thread is high-visibility electronics where price comparison is easy and competition is direct — the opposite of the conditions that make fake discounts work.

Categories where November discounting is most often illusory: furniture, mattresses, jewellery, fragrance, small kitchen appliances, clothing from brands that discount year-round, and anything sold primarily through a single retailer. These are the high-margin, comparison-resistant categories, and they are where the crossed-out numbers do the most work.

A practical consequence: the event is worth using for a short list of specific, comparable, high-value electronics you had already decided to buy. It is worth ignoring for browsing.

The method, in four minutes

Decide in advance. Write down the specific models you want, with their current prices, in September or early October. This single step neutralises the pre-sale markup, the permanent sale and the urgency widget all at once, because you arrive at the event already holding the reference price the retailer would rather supply.

Check the model number. Against the manufacturer's site, not the retailer's. A suffix you do not recognise means the comparison you are about to make is invalid.

Ignore the percentage and look at the price. The only question is whether this number is lower than the number you wrote down in September, and lower than what two other sellers are charging today. If yes, it is a deal regardless of what the tag claims. If no, it is not a deal regardless of how large the percentage is. This is the same discipline that applies to judging any discount, just under more time pressure and worse lighting.

Check the unit or lifetime cost where it applies. A printer, a coffee machine, a razor, anything with consumables: the November price on the hardware is not the cost of the thing. Work out the annual running cost before the discount on the device persuades you of anything.

Scanning a barcode with Priced collapses the first three of those checks into a few seconds in the aisle, which is mostly useful for the moment when you had not planned to buy anything and a sign changed your mind.

Returns policies are part of the price

One underrated November detail: return windows on sale items are frequently shorter, and clearance or open-box stock is often final sale. A slightly higher price from a seller with a thirty-day no-questions return is genuinely worth more than a lower price from one where you own the mistake permanently. Factor it in, particularly for anything you have not physically seen.

Extended holiday return windows do exist at many retailers and are a real benefit, but they usually apply to standard stock rather than to the doorbuster items, which is precisely where the risk of buying the wrong thing is highest.

Common questions

Are all struck-through prices fake?

No. Plenty of retailers discount honestly from a price they genuinely charged last month, and in several jurisdictions they are legally required to. The problem is that an honest and a dishonest reference price look identical on the tag, so the only reliable response is to establish your own baseline and treat every crossed-out figure as unverified.

Does waiting until Cyber Monday or later get better prices?

Sometimes, in online-heavy categories, and sometimes the reverse — popular items sell out and the remaining stock is not discounted. The pattern varies too much by category and year to be a rule. If the price in front of you beats the baseline you established in advance, take it; the marginal further saving is not worth the risk of losing it.

Is a price-tracking browser extension enough?

It helps a great deal and covers the pre-sale markup and permanent sale cases well, since it shows what the item actually sold for over past months. It will not catch event-specific model variants, because a derivative model number has no history to show, and it generally covers one retailer at a time. Use it alongside a model-number check rather than instead of one. There is more on reading a price chart properly in the price history guide.

What about "lowest price ever" badges?

They are a claim about that retailer's own history, not about the market, and they are only as meaningful as the retailer's willingness to define "ever". An item launched eight weeks ago has a very short history. Treat the badge as a mild positive signal and verify the number itself against other sellers.