Most ‘sales’ are
weaker than they
look. We keep the receipts.
Here's the oldest play in retail: quietly raise a product's price, then “discount” it back toward normal and slap a big % OFF on it. It works because you can't see the real price history. Ruck Post records every price, forever — so you can see which discounts actually beat what the brand charged before.
How an inflated sale works
Raise the price quietly
Weeks before a big sale, the 'regular' price creeps up. Nobody's watching, so nobody notices.
"Mark it down"
On sale day the price returns to roughly what it always was — but now there's a fat strike-through and a "40% OFF" badge next to it.
You feel the urgency
The bigger the discount looks, the harder it is to resist. The math only works because you can't see the price history. We can.
Sales that don't beat the brand's own best
Each of these brands is running a real sale right now — it's just not as deep as a discount we've already recorded from them. That's not proof of a trick; it's proof a better price has existed. Which is exactly what price history is for.
How we measure this: we compare a brand's current advertised sitewide discount against the deepest discount we've recorded from that same brand since we started tracking it. We only show a brand once we have at least a few days of history and a real gap.
No standout receipts today.
Good news for shoppers — the current sales aren't obviously worse than usual. Check back around the big sale events.
This gets sharper over time. We started tracking these brands only recently — as our price history deepens toward the big sale seasons, these receipts go from “worse than usual” to “this exact item was cheaper in September.” Want the receipts in your inbox the moment a real drop hits? Follow along →