The permanent sale: what a struck-through price is actually worth

If you shop for computers directly on manufacturer sites, you will notice something odd: certain business lines appear to be permanently, dramatically discounted. A machine listed at a high figure, struck through, beside a much lower price. Come back in a month and the same machine is on the same sale. Come back in six months and nothing has changed.

The struck-through number is a list price, and on some lines it is not a price at which the machine has ever been sold. It exists to make the real price look like a deal.

Why it is hard to see one product at a time

Looking at a single listing, a large discount is indistinguishable from a genuine one. You need one of two things to tell them apart: history for that machine, or a view across the whole market. A catalog that tracks many brands has both, and the pattern is unmistakable once you can sort by it — genuine markdowns are scattered across brands and move over time, while a handful of vendors show enormous, unchanging discounts across almost their entire lineup.

That concentration is the tell. Real sales end. A discount that never ends is not a discount, it is a price presentation.

What we do about it

We compare each machine's list price to its own selling price. When the ratio is implausibly large, the listing is flagged as inflated and excluded from anything where a fake markdown would corrupt the result:

• Discount statistics. The typical-markdown figure on the price index skips these listings entirely. Including them would report a market-wide discount level driven by a few vendors' presentation choices.
• The price-drop feed and the movers lists. A "drop" measured against a price that was never real is not news, and it would crowd out the genuine drops the feed exists to surface.

Note what we do not do: we don't hide the listing, and we don't hide the list price. The machine appears in the catalog with its actual selling price, which is the number that matters, and you can still see what the manufacturer claims. The judgement is about which numbers are allowed into aggregate statistics, not about censoring a vendor.

How to read a discount yourself

A few habits that cost nothing:

• Ignore the struck-through number and evaluate the real price on its own. Is this machine worth what it costs today, against everything else at that price? "60% off" is not a specification.
• Compare across brands, not within one. A vendor's own range tells you about that vendor's pricing strategy. The market tells you about value.
• Check whether the sale ever ends. If the same machine has been the same percentage off every time you've looked, you already know what the list price is for.
• Watch the actual selling price over time. That series either moves or it doesn't, and it can't be dressed up.

None of this is exotic — it is just tedious to do by hand across a hundred brands, which is the entire reason we normalize the data and publish it. If you want the same machine priced across the manufacturer and every retailer we match, that's on the product page; if you want the aggregate picture with the theatre filtered out, that's the price index.