I read this article, puzzled, thinking ... Amazon provides the list price? How haven't I noticed? I had to do an image search to remind me of an example of that. Of course, once I saw the page, I understood what they were referring to but apparently my brain has been filtering that part of the page due to years of conditioning.<p>For all practical purposes, the list price on American e-commerce sites is a worthless bit of information on a product page. I don't think in somewhere around 20 years of purchasing things online and from catalogs I've <i>ever</i> paid anything close to list price and I've never felt like I got a "good deal" simply because the gap between list and actual was large. In fact, I'd probably be disinclined to purchase a product with too large a gap between list and actual, making the assumption that something must be horribly wrong if they're trying to get rid of the thing at such a steep discount.<p>Though I'm very glad this deceptive practice is being targeted, if only from the perspective of eliminating one more useless bit of noise from product pages (can we also filter out the two word reviews?), I'd imagine <i>very few</i> people[0] actually believe that price represents a realistic product price for 99% of products[1].<p>[0] In the US this is a <i>ridiculously</i> common practice with the worst offenders being auto dealers. They'll list MSRP along-side a nearly impossible to qualify-for manufacturer incentives (unless you're active military, employee of the brand, have the brand's credit card points maxed out, are a previous owner of the brand ... in one case I discovered the discounts couldn't actually be combined making the deal truly <i>impossible</i>)<p>[1] About the only time this <i>is</i> true is when the product provider has a minimum advertised price requiring an extra step to see the price only once the item is in your cart (somehow, that's a loop hole?). Or Apple products...