Because of course they can.
Meh… not sure what’s the get worked up about. Is it any worse my local grocery store jacking the price of ground beef jumps from $4 a pound to $6 a pound when there’s a buy-one/get-one sale? Or any of the mens’ clothing retailers whose default pricing is “Buy One, Get One Free”? Nobody has ever walked out of Joseph A. Banks with only one suit; the real price is half the sticker. Or car dealerships, where you know there’s a couple grand of give in the sticker price?
Who would buy a $200 blender without checking it out on online first, anyway? ESPECIALLY when everybody in the world has a smartphone in their pocket.
Much ado over nothing. Are you really trusting your retailer to give you completely honest information about how much something is worth?
Also:
> If you still want to bargain hunt, I’d stop doing the research yourself and trust the folks at The Wirecutter, who are hand-selecting the best (real!) deals right now.
How much did that little placement cost The Wirecutter?
I believe there was a grocery store in the North/Northwest that was so lazy while doing this that they put the sale tags over the original regular price tags. One of the customers slid the sale tags to the side and took embarrassing pictures capturing all three prices together: the original regular price, the “sale” price, and the new “regular” price.
Who bargain shops at Macy’s anyway?
Retailers own politics.
Special offer that.
BOGO.
Websites will also offer different prices depending on your location, browsing history, OS, and browser.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323777204578189391813881534
Seems like this should be some flavor of fraud.
This practice is as old as capitalism itself. I don’t see how it requires multiple outraged blog posts. Any realistic shopper realizes that a certain amount of flim-flammery occurs in retail. This particular example doesn’t come close to a moral, legal or ethical breach, so what’s the problem?
And yes, caveat emptor.
This is, sadly, perfectly normal practice. One of the things that lead to JCPenny almost crashing and burning when they decided to stop playing mind-games with the customers was the decision to no user fake sales of this sort, which is pretty much standard practice in quite a range of stores.
In general, anything you see that’s on sale that isn’t a clearance item or loss-leader is probably being sold at it’s /real/ price, the higher price is just there to 1: generate perceived value and 2: trigger the “ooh, I’d saving money!” responce
My wife. 
Macy’s actually has some phenomenal sales if you pay attention. The catch this year? Macy’s best sales were the weekend before Thanksgiving. For example, they sold all of their costume jewelry for $7 a piece. You can combine sale prices with some coupons, too.
Here’s some sweet Macy’s tips:
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Those coupons that only work with Macy’s credit cards? Work with gift cards too. I lucked into the best salesperson there ever who rings me up at one register, sells me a gift card for the exact amount at another, then swipes the new gift card to complete the sale.
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Weirdly, online prices do not necessarily match store prices. Sometimes their online prices are cheaper. Got my daughter a dress that was $100 at the store and half that online. Also did this with some pants for her. May be a Juniors department thing mostly.
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