How to spot a discount that is not really a discount
A discount is measured from a price the chain set itself — and that is the whole problem
A promotion is not a good price. A promotion is a discount from a price somebody set, and that somebody is the party profiting from the sale. This does not make all promotions bad — it makes a test necessary.
The only test that really works
Do not compare the promotional price to the "before" price. Compare it to the ordinary price of the same product at another chain. If the post-discount price is still higher than what the neighbouring chain charges with no promotion at all, the discount is real but insufficient.
An example from a measurement we ran on 13 August 2026: the same Turkish coffee sold for ₪19.90 at the priciest chain and ₪12.90 at the cheapest. Even a 30% discount off the expensive one lands at ₪13.93 — still more than the ordinary, undiscounted price elsewhere.
Three promotions that are not promotions
The first is a discount off an inflated price. If the branch's regular price was above average to begin with, a discount merely returns it to roughly where everyone else already is. The gap disappears; the saving never existed.
The second is a volume deal you will not consume: "3 for" on a product you buy once a month is not a discount, it is inventory. If the third one goes in the bin, you paid more, not less.
The third is the discount that looks too good. A 90%-plus discount is almost never a real product — it is a technical row in the chain's file, a delivery fee, a coupon or a parsing error — which is why we filter it out of the deals page before it reaches you.
Why there is junk in promotion data at all
Chains publish their promotion files automatically, and an automatic file contains things nobody meant to publish: a technical item priced at one agora, a coupon code recorded as a product, a truncated price. Sort promotions by the size of the discount and those exact rows jump to the top.
So the deals page filters them: a final price that is too low, an impossible discount rate, or a steep discount landing at exactly one shekel. What survives still includes genuinely steep clearances — they simply do not look like errors.
When a promotion is genuinely worth it
When the post-discount price is below the cheapest ordinary price you found, when it is a product you buy anyway, and when the quantity matches the rate you get through it. All three conditions, not one of them.
And if the product keeps — tinned food, toilet paper, laundry detergent — a real promotion is the one occasion where buying more than you need today makes sense.