Most "Was" Prices Were Never the Price. We Checked.

A sale tag makes two claims. One is the price you pay today, which is easy to check. The other is the crossed-out "was" price above it, which is the whole reason the tag says "sale". Almost nobody checks that one, because checking it takes a record of what the product actually cost.

Fazy keeps that record. We read the prices of the products we list and store each change we see, with its date. So on September 30, 2026, we asked our own data a simple question: when a retailer shows a "was" price, was that ever the price?

The short answer: mostly not

We took every product in our catalogue that was showing a "was" price at least 5% above its current price, whose current price we had read within the previous three days, and that we had been tracking for at least 30 days with at least four recorded price observations. On average we had watched each one for about eight weeks, with 13 recorded observations.

For 83% of them, we never recorded the product at its "was" price. Not once, in the whole time we watched, did it sell within 2% of the price the tag says it used to cost.

By category

Wellness: 97% of "was" prices never seen.

Cosmetics: 96%.

Home: 91%.

Footwear: 91%.

Electronics: 88%.

Appliances: 75%.

Apparel: 68%.

Apparel comes closest to honest: about a third of its "was" prices were prices we had seen, which fits a category with real seasonal markdowns. Beauty and wellness are at the other end. In those categories a struck-through price is, in our records, almost always a number the product did not sell at while we watched.

The permanent sale

43% of these products showed the same price at every one of our checks. A crossed-out price that never moves is not a discount that started and will end. It is how the product is presented. When Black Friday comes, many of these keep their price and get a louder banner.

The real discounts are smaller

Real price drops do exist. For 45% of these products we had recorded a higher price at some point, and for those, today's price averaged 21% below the highest price we had seen.

Compare that with the tags. The median advertised discount across all of them was 25%, and the average was 30%, but for most products those percentages were measured against a price we never saw. The honest version of the typical "sale" is smaller, and it applies to fewer products.

What this means for Black Friday

The percentage on a tag tells you how the retailer wants the price compared. It does not tell you whether the price is good. Two questions do. What did this product cost a month ago? And is today's price the lowest it has been?

That is how we built our Black Friday page. A product appears there only when the price we read within the last day is the lowest we have recorded for it, and lower than the price it had before. The crossed-out price on each tile is that earlier price from our own record, with its date, not the retailer's "was". For the full checklist, read how to tell a real Black Friday deal from a fake one.

How we measured

Which products. Every product in Fazy's catalogue on September 30, 2026 that showed a reference price (the "was", "list", "compare at" or suggested price a store publishes) at least 5% above its current price; whose current price we had read within the previous three days; that was not marked out of stock; and that we had tracked for at least 30 days, with at least four recorded price observations.

What counts as "seen". A "was" price counts as seen if we ever recorded the product at a price within 2% of it, or above it. Everything else counts as never seen.

What it cannot tell you. We record the prices we read, not every minute of a product's life. A "was" price could have applied briefly between our reads, or before we started tracking the product. That is why we required at least 30 days of history, and why the finding is stated for the time we watched. It is a measurement of our records, not an accusation against any single store, and some of the remaining 17% are entirely genuine.

We will run the same measurement again after Black Friday and publish what changed.