Businesses don’t want to offer you good deals. But they do want you to THINK you’re getting a good deal.

There are a lot of tricks to pull this off, but one of the simplest and most prevalent is just to put a smaller number next to a crossed out bigger number.

Doesn’t seem like that would work, but boy it does. Check out this video from TikTok user @jaymes.png:

“Okay. Do not buy anything on Amazon before watching this – watch. It’s Prime Day on Amazon. So you think yeah, everything’s on sale, right? Wrong. Here have an examples.”

“INIU Wireless Charger $15.98. That’s 41% off. That’s crazy, right?”

“But if you take the link and copy it and you go over, this website right here is called Camel Camel Camel dot com. Go in here, you put the link in up there and search it, you find it and you’ll notice right before Prime Day they jumped it up to $24.98. It was usually right over here around $16 and it will kind of fluctuate 16 to 20, 16 to 20. All of a sudden it jumps to $24.98 and then guess what? An increased list price. But dude, they never sold it for that high. But they did for Prime Day. And they gave you a 41% discount on a fake price.”

“And the beauty of this website is you can find something like the Apple AirPods Max often confirmed that $400 bucks is in fact the best price they’ve offered in a long time.”

“Lowest you ever seen is around $430, but over here, 400 bucks. That’s how you find a good deal on Amazon.”

@jaymes.png

WATCH OUT FOR SCAMS ON AMAZON! Shop smarter this Prime Day #Amazon #PrimeDay

♬ original sound – Jaymes

You can check for yourself, it happens all the time.

And it’s crazy common.

The spike doesn’t even need to last long. It just has to technically exist in order for it not to be considered false advertising.

When is a sale not a sale?

Shop smart out there.

If you liked that story, check out this one about a Costco customer who got their cart stolen… so she hatched a plan to get it back!