This is America, and Americans love bargains, love to shop, aren't particularly good at math, and retailers of all various stripes know this. You might think that the fact that discount stores are ubiquitous, such as TJ Maxx, Marshalls, as well as many others, that people wouldn't need to see a price tag with the words: "compare at" or "retailed at" on the clothing merchandise to understand that the price that they were seeing more often than not represented a fair price, but there is something about "saving" money, there is something about "bargains", there is something about "discounts", that makes certain shoppers salivate at their projected savings and thereby buy more stuff.
For certain people, when looking at tags which state, "compare at" or "retails at", they don't pay any attention to such nonsense, knowing that it's a game played by the retailers to "anchor in" a price within your mind, so that you wrongly believe that you are receiving some sort of privileged discount, instead, they see it as essentially misinformation and misdirection, and thereby decide whether to buy a particular item based on its merits and their view of its intrinsic worth. However, there is a rather large subset of Americans, that take words such as "compare at" and "retails at" as if these really mean what they believe that they purport to mean, which is, that somebody, somewhere, is purchasing or has purchased this very good or something similar to it at that price, and therefore they are "getting over" on the retailer by purchasing this item from them, at such a massive discount. Really?
As might be expected, consumers have rights, and retailers have to conform to such rights, so that when posting prices which state "compare at" or "retails at" there are specific rules and regulations that retailers must adhere to. However, the law is somewhat nebulous, and in a country that offers an attorney at every corner, that isn't too surprising. Each store seems to have its own set of rules as to what constitutes a sale in regards to regularly priced merchandise and what "compare at" or "retails at" means, to which the retailer as a matter of course posts a sign dealing specifically with this issue; of course, virtually nobody reads the sign, if they even take notice of it. So too, the Federal Trade Commission weighed in as to what regular pricing should represent which essentially boils down to a good being offered by a given retailer at a regular basis for a reasonably substantial period of time. However, missing from this equation is whether the given item at any time, was ever sold at that retail price, or what percentage of that item was sold at that retail price, which is something that the retail store probably knows but obviously doesn't divulge.
If all of this fake discounting or illusions of fantastic bargains was done tongue in cheek, it would be one thing, but in fact, it is part and parcel of the business model of many of these retail stores. While it is true that bargains and discounts do exist on many items, it is also true, that the percentage of those items and the percentage of true discounts are skewed in such a manner so as to display to the consumer compelling significant savings that aren't truly there. The fact of the matter is, these stores are profitable, indicating for a certainty that the stores selling the products are well aware of the underlying cost of the products being sold, whereas the consumer dupes herself or is duped into believing far too often that all that glitters is gold.