This is Checking Out, a column about how we shop, what we buy, and how it all makes us feel. Email tips and ideas to checking.out@slate.com.
As a warm-blooded millennial woman who spent much of the early aughts roaming the expanses of suburban Ohio shopping malls, I have been hardwired to love a bargain.
If you’re from the Midwest, you know it’s customary to respond to a compliment on your outfit with an effusive “Thank you so much, I got it dirt cheap on massive sale!” It’s a reflexive response I’ve maintained across the various locales I’ve lived, equal parts homage to my roots and to my dedication to bargain shopping.
But my go-to compliment response has recently started coming out a bit muted, less proud and exuberant. In an era of Google price tracking, made-up shopping holidays like Prime Day and Singles’ Day, and an ever-bloated holiday discount season, bargain shopping is starting to lose its luster.
Part of the unbridled joy of nabbing a great discount is the thrill of the chase. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to derive satisfaction from a marketplace where everything feels like it’s perpetually on sale—and if it’s not yet, it inevitably will be next week.
I’m not alone in my exasperation. In December, Steven Levano, a marketing manager based in New York City, took to TikTok to bemoan sales he says are “getting really out of hand,” exemplified by his experience tracking the price of a cardigan at Old Navy.
“This thing has never actually been on sale, the full price has always been $27.47,” he says in the video, in reference to the listed sales price. “The price has never gone up from there and it’s never gone down from there. The $54.99 that they’ve listed is just a lie. And the sale that they want you to believe is a sale that never actually happened.”
Users in the comments aired their own grievances of seemingly perpetual and deceptive sales at their favorite stores. Some said it turned them off shopping completely or pushed them to shop exclusively at thrift stores.
“This new illusion of savings is really just a disservice to everyone,” Levano told me. “I just think the retail industry as a whole has lost the plot.” (Old Navy did not respond to Slate’s request for comment on its discount practices.)
Watching Levano’s video, I couldn’t help but feel like many of us are essentially in a toxic situationship with discount culture. According to a recent Capital One study, American shoppers are twice as likely to buy a product with a 20 percent discount, and 91 percent of consumers check for sales online before making a purchase. We yearn for the dopamine hit of a good deal, but at the same time feel gaslit by retailers that aren’t transparent about their pricing policies.
Though retailers are expected to abide by Federal Trade Commission laws against deceptive pricing, nuances in state-level policies and enforcement can allow dubious sales activity to fall between the cracks.
Specifically, FTC guidelines warn against “establishing a fictitious higher price on which a deceptive comparison might be based” and state retailers must ensure “the price is one at which the product was openly and actively offered for sale, for a reasonably substantial period of time, in the recent, regular course of his business, honestly and in good faith.”
Each state subsequently has its own stipulations, including specific definitions for terms like “compare at.” New York, for example, requires that if a retailer is claiming a category of goods is up to 50 percent off the original price, at least 15 percent of all products in this advertised category must be marketed at the maximum of 50 percent.
Still, these policies can be difficult to enforce. And it doesn’t help that historical precedent shows that ditching discount culture in favor of more transparent pricing can serve as a death knell for retailers.
Then–JCPenney CEO Ron Johnson learned this the hard way back in 2012. Shortly after taking the helm, he launched a plan to get rid of sales and coupons in favor of simply lowering prices across the board. Seems simple enough. Customers want lower prices … right? However, sales immediately tanked—the company ended up losing $4 billion, its share price halved, and Johnson got the boot.
And so, retailers have little incentive to change their ways. This then leaves consumers with two choices: accept the smoke-and-mirrors practice of endless sales or take matters into their own hands. An October 2024 report found that false-discount class action lawsuits doubled over the 12 months prior, with allegations growing against retailers ranging from traditional department stores like Neiman Marcus to fast-fashion e-commerce darlings like Boohoo.
Ellen Robbins, partner at Akerman LLP and author of the report, told me that so far in 2025, they’ve seen at least one lawsuit on deceptive pricing filed each day in California alone.
She said she expects this upward trend to continue, particularly in places like California and New York, where courts “ tend to give plaintiffs greater opportunity or greater leniency instead of immediately dismissing these types of lawsuits.”
Most of the filings are class action lawsuits that retailers aim to settle quickly and quietly, rather than litigating them, which can be both costly and garner undesired press.
“As long as the lawsuits are resolved for relatively small dollar amounts, many companies will do the math and determine that it doesn’t make sense to spend the legal fees in addition to the resources and potential publicity,” Robbins said.
For many retailers, the reward of using deceptive pricing ultimately often outweighs the risks, Robbins said. This is especially true as traditional retailers try to stay afloat amid increased competition from the rise of discount retailers, dollar stores, fast fashion, and online dropshippers.
“Some [retailers] might say, ‘If I don’t discount my items, I’m going to lose this competitive market share. I understand I have some exposure here, but I’m going to roll the dice. If somebody sues me, somebody sues me. I can probably get rid of it,’ ” Robbins said.
According to Steve Dennis, a retail expert and founder of SageBerry Consulting, “promotional intensity continues to escalate” in response to increased pressure to keep prices low amid ongoing economic turbulence and the continued rise of e-commerce.
Some of these pricing practices appear to be a holdover from the early days of the pandemic, when many retailers ran massive sales to get rid of surplus inventory resulting from closed stores, shipping bottlenecks, and waning consumer demand.
And even though the economy has improved—in 2024, real GDP increased at an annual rate of 2.3 percent, due in part to an increase in consumer spending in both goods and services, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Commerce—pervasive sales remain.
“Lots of promotional retailers would say they sell almost nothing at regular price,” Dennis said. “[As a consumer] why would you buy something at a regular price when the next day or next week it’s going to be 30, 40, 50 percent off?”
He added that price tracking tools, such as Google’s suite of price monitoring features launched in June, have further exacerbated discount cycles now that it’s easier than ever for consumers to keep tabs on promotions.
“The internet allows people to shop for prices,” he said. “To go back 30 years, even 20 years, it was a lot harder to get visibility to the best deals.”
Hearing this, I’m wistful for the halcyon shopping days of yore—my teenage afternoons spent beelining to picked-over sales racks at the mall and the early mornings wrenching bleary-eyed family members out of bed to join me for Black Friday doorbusters. Hitting “Buy Now” on a pair of pants I spent a month laboriously price tracking will simply never hit the same.
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