It gets more mildly infuriating when you notice that they’ll typically jack up the prices just before a “Sale” to make it seem like a better deal.

Usually the product being sold at 50% off are:

• things that would’ve been liquidated anyway
• things that aren’t actually 50% off. The base price was increased.
• crap to get you in the door because the retailer knows you’re going to spend more on other stuff during the holiday period

Most of these "sales" are bullshit and we are outright being lied to regarding pricing.

Should be illegal, but it's not.

I worked in retail grocery, but I would imagine the situation is the same in other retail outlets. Everybody who has replied so far has a piece of the answer. Sometimes the sale item is a "loss leader," sold below cost to bring customers to the store, where they'll buy other products at the same time. Sometimes the price is jacked up before putting it on sale to hide a price increase, or take advantage of the anchoring effect. Sometimes stores take a loss on a product that isn't selling well, and they just want to get rid of it to free up space. And sometimes the store's buyers got a really good deal on purchasing inventory, for many possible reasons, like a bulk purchase, supplier clearing the warehouse, or pre-booking the order well in advance. (Manufacturers often give discounts for guaranteed purchases.)

But, yes, as you suspect, sometimes the markup is outrageously high, and they can still make a profit when offering 50% off. (Not often in grocery, which is a low-margin business.)

My friend worked at Best Buy corporate some ten years ago. He got the corporate discount at stores so we went to check it out. Most of the big name stuff had almost nothing. So their margins were pretty thin there (not to say those companies couldn’t sell their products for less just that BB wasn’t getting most of your cash).

But for their in-house stuff like anything Insignia, the cost of a $20 HDMI cable went to $4. And that was a discount so BB was still making something.

I’ve started to become super jaded about discounts, especially at grocery stores because now I’m not looking at it like “wow I’m saving on eggs” but rather “so you’re probably overstocked and want me to bail you out or you’ll lose a shit on of profits if these go bad”.

JCPenney got rid of sales years ago and went with a year round price based on the discounted price. The CEO who had the idea was later fired because the company was losing a lot of money and sales were down compared to other retailers.

The constant sales are done because the retail strategy works.

Cute, you actually think anything was actually 50% off...

Where are these magical 50% off sales? I haven’t seen any discounts on stuff worth buying this year (or last).

I just hate how commercialized the holidays have become.

Isn’t weird that we only have one day to celebrate Thanksgiving, but we have fucking Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday right after Thanksgiving?

It's even more mildly infuriating for us across the pond... we don't have Thanksgiving but we now get the Black Friday/ Cyber Monday nonsense. Grrr!

They're offering discounts on stuff they could unload. They have to get them out of the back room to make room for new stock.

Many/most of the sales are not at a significantly lower cost than most of the time. Prices go up for a month or two before Christmas. For the sales, you might get a good discount on a single item in a store, which is when they expect you to buy other things too to make up for the single sale. Other times many things will be at slight discount, but they might at operating cost or much lower profit margin. You are expected to buy things which are not on sale when the sale is real, otherwise the price was raised for a while and only lowered for the sale. I have also heard that some things are made with lower quality for sales, so you may not be getting the normal quality.

Imagine how we feel, when you don't live in the US and you still got hit by the black friday...

Keep in mind a lot of these products are likely priced to be on-sale, and are scarcely purchased at full price.

This is especially true in stuff like Laptops, which are rarely purchased at full price anyway.

You don't have to buy anything in the sales.

I feel the same way about grocery store club cards. "Let us vacuum up your buying habits to sell to information brokers while simultaneously ripping off everybody that doesn't use a card."

Yes. Either my patience for all the sales has fully evaporated or the sales themselves are becoming truly insufferable (or both), because at this point I do as little shopping Thanksgiving week as possible. And this year I used "Black Friday" sales emails as a reminder to unsubscribe from things.

50% tends to be the approximate price a retailer will have purchased an item for from its distributor. If they are selling something at 50% they are likely losing money on that sale given operating costs. It's either a loss leader or they are emptying back stock.

It depends, sometimes sales are at a loss for the company to simply clear out stock that they were not selling quickly enough.

I think you are a minority

Fyi most stores mark up about 500% from what it cost to land.