The Reference Price Files: What 90 Days of Price Tracking Told Us About 'Was' Tags

Every shopper knows the feeling. You spot a coffee machine marked £79, down from £149, and think: was it ever £149? That nagging doubt is exactly why we decided to stop guessing and start measuring.

For 90 days, our team tracked 100 everyday products — kettles, air fryers, trainers, own-brand staples, a frankly embarrassing number of straightening brushes — across major UK retailers including Argos, Currys, John Lewis, Boots, Amazon UK and several big high-street names. Using price history tools and a good old-fashioned spreadsheet, we logged every price change, every 'was' tag, and every suspiciously convenient 'temporary' discount.

What counts as an honest 'was' price?

We set a simple bar. A reference price is fair if the item genuinely sold at that price for a reasonable stretch of time — we said at least 14 consecutive days — within the past six months. Anything less, and we called it a phantom price.

The results were a proper mixed bag. Roughly a third of the 'was' prices we tracked passed the test. Another third had technically been charged at some point, but only briefly, or during a seasonal spike (think January fitness gear priced high in December). The final third? The 'was' price looked like it had been plucked from the air.

The retailers that behaved

John Lewis and Argos came out of this looking tidy. Their reference prices generally matched real, sustained selling prices, partly because both retailers run longer price cycles rather than constant rollercoaster discounting. Currys was middling — honest more often than not, but with occasional 'flash sale' prices that turned out to be barely below the price from a fortnight earlier.

The online-only end of the market was where things got spicy. Several marketplace-style listings showed 'was' prices that had never appeared in our logs at any point during the tracking window. One popular air fryer claimed a £129 original price; our data showed it launched at £99 and hadn't shifted since.

The three tricks to watch for

The holiday hike. Prices creep up in the weeks before a sale event, making the 'discount' look generous. We saw a set of luggage rise 22% in early November before 'dropping' back to its October price for Black Friday.

The short spike. An item sells at a high price for exactly as long as required, then gets permanently 'reduced'. Legally, this can tick the box. Ethically, it's a shrug.

The phantom bundle. A 'was' price tied to a bundle or a different colourway that barely sold, letting the retailer reference a price nobody actually paid.

How to check before you buy

You don't need our spreadsheet to protect yourself. Free price history tools let you paste a product URL and see a chart of past prices — if the 'was' price doesn't appear anywhere on that line, you have your answer. It takes ten seconds.

Other quick habits worth building:

• Screenshot the price when you're browsing but not buying. Retailer price histories reset, and a screenshot gives you leverage if you want to ask for a price match later.
• Check the price across retailers before assuming a 'reduction' is unique to one shop. Half the time, the same item sits at that 'sale' price everywhere.
• Be sceptical of round-number was prices — £150 'was' tags on £99 products are the most common pattern we saw.

The verdict

The good news is that plenty of UK discounts are real, and the biggest retailers are generally more honest than the stereotype suggests. The bad news is that the worst offenders are exactly the listings that shout loudest about their savings.

The 'was' price isn't a promise — it's marketing. Treat it as a claim to be verified, not a fact to be trusted, and you'll rarely overpay again. Three months of data taught us one thing above all: the best discount is knowing what something actually costs.