Nobody chose the crossed-out price

Much of what is sold online around the Gulf arrives with two prices. One is the price. The other, larger and struck through, is a number the item has rarely, if ever, been sold for.

Nobody set out to build this. Each person involved is doing something sensible.

Shoppers scroll past anything that is not marked down, because a full price has come to feel like a mistake. The big stores that list thousands of items sort and highlight by discount, because that is what shoppers click on. So the small seller, who would happily just state a fair price, raises the reference price and then cuts it, because a fair price with no cut sinks out of sight. The next seller sees that and does the same. Within a season it is simply how selling works.

Ask any one of them and they would rather not. The seller says the store rewards it. The store says shoppers demand it. The shoppers say they are only reacting to what is put in front of them.

That is what a system looks like. Nobody steering, everyone behaving reasonably, and an outcome no one would have picked. It survives because it is invisible from inside, where each participant sees only their own small, defensible choice.

Systems like this almost never change because the people within them resolve to do better. A lone honest seller just gets buried. They change when the inputs or the rules change, when the cost of the old habit finally falls on whoever creates it. A rule that a crossed-out price must have been a real price, for a real stretch of time, would do in a month what years of good intentions cannot.