When seasonal sales are real, and when they are theatre

The big retail events produce real discounts and fake ones side by side, and the badge looks identical. The only way to tell them apart is to know what the product cost before the event started — which is why price history matters most in exactly the week everyone stops checking it.

What tends to be real

• End-of-generation stock. A successor has been announced, and the outgoing model genuinely gets cleared.
• Overstocked seasonal goods. Real oversupply, real price cuts.
• Competitive categories where several independents cut in the same week. When multiple unrelated shops move together, it is usually a genuine market shift rather than one retailer's campaign.

What tends to be theatre

• A "regular price" that appeared shortly before the event. The reference is manufactured to make the discount look larger.
• Deep discounts on products nobody was buying anyway. The saving is real; the demand was not.
• Percentages on inflated list prices that never survived contact with the market.

The check that takes ten seconds

Look up the product, read the 90-day median, and compare. If the event price is meaningfully below that median, it is a genuine saving. If it is at or above it, the badge is decoration — regardless of what the crossed-out figure says.

That check works in any month. It just matters more in November.

What we do during events

Nothing different, deliberately. The same freshness rules, the same anomaly checks, the same refusal to call an unverified price the best price. A price that drops 70% overnight with no corroboration from any other store gets flagged rather than promoted, whatever the date is.

We currently track 4 products carried by three or more independent stores — the ones where a cross-store check is actually meaningful.

Prepare before the event, not during it

The single most effective thing you can do is boring: decide what you want before the discounting starts, and write down what it costs today.

That one note converts the entire event from a persuasion exercise into an arithmetic one. On the day, the badge becomes irrelevant — you have your own reference price, from before anyone had a reason to move it.

If you do not have your own note, use ours. Every product page here carries the price we recorded and the moment we recorded it, which is exactly the number a pre-event reference is supposed to be.

Three questions on the day

Is this price below what the product normally sells for? Not below the crossed-out figure — below the price the market actually charges. That is the only comparison that means anything.

Are other stores matching it? One store cutting alone during an event is a campaign. Several unrelated stores cutting in the same week is usually a real market movement, and the second is much more likely to be a genuine floor.

Would I want this at this price in March? Event pressure is manufactured scarcity. If the answer is no, the discount is not the problem.

The trap specific to expensive equipment

For machines and grinders, event discounts are often smaller in percentage terms than the ordinary gap between retailers. It is entirely common for a non-discounting store to beat a discounting one on the same model on the same day, simply because it prices lower year-round.

Which means the highest-value check during a sale is not "how big is the discount" but "who is cheapest right now" — the same check as any other week. See where stores currently disagree most.

What we will not tell you

We will not tell you which month is cheapest, or that prices reliably fall in any particular week. We would need years of our own observations to say that honestly, and we do not have them yet. When we do, it will appear as a measurement with the dataset behind it, not as a seasonal tip. How we decide what we can claim.