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

Browse manufacturer stores for long enough and you start noticing machines that have been 60% off for their entire lives. Same laptop, same strikethrough, same sale, in March and in September. The list price it's discounted from was never a price anyone paid. It exists so the selling price has something flattering to stand next to.

How you can tell

One listing can't tell you much, because a real discount and a manufactured one look identical in isolation. That's presumably the point. You need history on the exact machine, or a view across the whole market, and once the catalog had both the pattern was hard to unsee. Genuine markdowns are scattered across brands, they come and they go. The manufactured ones cluster: a handful of vendors, enormous near-identical discounts across most of the lineup, unchanged month after month.

What we do with them

Mostly we refuse to let them into the statistics. The typical-discount figure on the price index skips listings whose list-to-selling ratio is implausible, and the price-drop feed won't announce a "drop" measured against a number that was never real. The listing itself stays in the catalog with both prices visible. Nothing is hidden. The judgement is only about which numbers are allowed to feed the aggregates.

For your own shopping, the useful habit is duller than any of this: ignore the strikethrough entirely and ask whether the machine is worth its actual price against everything else at that price. And if the same machine has been the same percentage off every time you've looked, you already know what the list price is for.