The Grocery Store Trap Most Shoppers Never Notice

Every trip through the grocery store involves scanning dozens of little yellow and red tags promising a deal. Almost nobody stops to ask where the number sitting right next to that discounted price actually came from.

That crossed out original price is doing far more psychological work than the sale price itself. Researchers who study pricing have found it can shape spending even when the original number was never real to begin with.

None of it requires an actual lie printed anywhere on the shelf tag. Here is the grocery store trap most shoppers walk past without ever noticing.

The Number Next To The Sale Price Is Doing The Real Work

The trick is called price anchoring, and it works by giving shoppers a reference point to compare against before they ever consider whether the sale price itself is actually a good deal. A high original price makes almost any discount look generous, regardless of what the item is actually worth.

Some retailers have been accused of setting that original price artificially high, or keeping an item on perpetual sale, so the discounted number effectively becomes the real price the whole time. “Retailers often compare a ‘sale’ price to the original price,” but consumers should be skeptical of those original prices, Harvard Business School researcher Donald Ngwe has said, according to Harvard Business School.

Researchers Actually Measured How Much It Costs Shoppers

Ngwe’s research found that for every dollar increase in a posted original price, shoppers were willing to pay an average of 77 cents more for the exact same item. The effect hit infrequent shoppers hardest, since customers less familiar with a brand’s typical pricing had the least ability to spot an inflated anchor.

A separate study by the nonprofit Consumers’ Checkbook tracked prices at several major retailers for 44 weeks and found some items sat on sale so consistently that the discounted price functioned as the item’s real price the entire time, according to NBC News. Executive editor Kevin Brasler argued that any sale running more than half the time amounts to a misleading illusion of a deal rather than a genuine discount.

Stores Have Been Sued Over It Before

Major retailers including JCPenney, Sears, Macy’s and Kohl’s were sued by a city attorney’s office over exactly this practice, accused of advertising original prices that were never actually charged, according to AOL.

JCPenney once tried eliminating the practice entirely, replacing inflated sale tags with simple, consistently low prices. The experiment failed almost immediately, according to Goodreads, since shoppers missed the psychological thrill of feeling like they had scored a deal, even a manufactured one.

Grocery stores run the exact same mechanism through weekly sale flyers and shelf tags advertising a crossed out higher price. Nothing about the underlying anchoring tactic is unique to clothing or electronics, it works the same way on a discounted box of cereal.

None of this means every sale tag in a grocery store is fake, plenty of discounts are completely genuine. It just means the crossed out number sitting next to the price is worth a little skepticism, since research suggests it is often doing more to shape a purchase than the actual discount ever does.