Nobody Believes Your Sale Anymore

/ Brand & Strategy, Industry Insights / By
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Nobody Believes Your Sale Anymore

Faith in advertised discounts fell by more than half in a year, the season crept into October, and four forecasters cannot agree on what anyone will spend.

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Last year, 46% of American shoppers said advertised discounts reflected true savings. This year it is 22% (Simon-Kucher, 2026). Belief in your sale price did not gently erode. It fell off a shelf.

Which is awkward, because a sale is almost certainly the centrepiece of your Q4 plan.

Illustrated woman in a coral-pink blazer holds up a red price tag reading $178.00 with a 20% off rosette, looking unconvinced.

The discount stopped doing its job

Simon-Kucher surveyed 1,500 American adults in August and found that only 22% believe advertised discounts represent real savings, down from 46% a year earlier (Simon-Kucher, 2026). Another 29% say discounts deliver only partial savings, or rarely reflect actual savings at all. Seventy-seven percent say inflation has changed how they shop, and 37% now lean on promotions to justify non-essential purchases.

The same research found shoppers generally accept savings in the 15% to 25% range, and that the roughly 40% markdown is no longer a common sight (Simon-Kucher, 2026).

Meanwhile, the discounts themselves keep getting deeper. Adobe forecasts average peak discounts rising from 14% in early November to 21% before Thanksgiving and 30% during Cyber Week, before settling back to 10% to 15% in December (Adobe, 2026).

So the industry’s response to a credibility problem has been a larger number inside a starburst. As Simon-Kucher’s Shikha Jain put it, “The retailers that win won’t necessarily be the loudest discounters” (as cited in Simon-Kucher, 2026).

Shoppers still want a deal. They have stopped taking the deal’s word for it, and started asking a person.

The season moved into October, but not in Canada

Deloitte polled 4,000 American consumers between August 26 and September 10, 2026, with a margin of error of plus or minus two points. It expects 28% of holiday budgets to be spent by the end of October, the highest share in six years (as cited in Hensel, 2026). Forty-two percent plan to shop October sales events (as cited in Hensel, 2026), a channel Deloitte says has gained 18 percentage points of momentum since 2023. One in four shoppers had already bought holiday gifts during June promotions (Deloitte, 2026).

Deloitte also identifies a segment it calls value seekers: 38% of shoppers who practise five or more money-saving behaviours. They plan to spend 12% more than everyone else, and 65% of them were already shopping in October (as cited in Hensel, 2026). The people hunting hardest for a deal are also the people spending the most, which should settle any lingering argument about whether discount shoppers are worth courting.

Adobe puts October online spending at $95.8 billion, up 8% year over year (Adobe, 2026).

Now the part the US headlines will not tell you. In Canada, the calendar has not moved. It has compressed. The Retail Council of Canada and Leger surveyed 2,500 Canadians between August 21 and September 4, 2026, and found that 88% rank Black Friday among their top three shopping days, up from 84% last year, with 52% ranking it first (Retail Council of Canada, 2026). Cyber Monday placed in the top three for 72%, up from 64%. Black Friday and Cyber Week are each expected to absorb about 29% of Canadian holiday budgets.

PwC’s Canadian outlook, fielded in July and early August, points the same way: 38% of Gen Z and 33% of millennials plan to concentrate their shopping around Black Friday weekend, while 43% of boomers intend to wait until December (as cited in Retail Insider, 2026).

If you sell in Canada and you shift budget into October because an American statistic told you to, you will be spending your best money in a month where your customer has not shown up yet.

Four forecasts, four numbers, and a note on who paid for them

Here is where the week’s news gets entertaining. Four credible organizations published 2026 holiday forecasts, and they disagree about direction, not just magnitude.

The National Retail Federation expects November and December sales to rise 4.2% to $1.013 trillion, up from $972 billion in 2025 (Retail Insight Network, 2026). Deloitte expects average household spending to rise 4% to $1,654 (Deloitte, 2026). Circana, surveying more than 3,500 shoppers, puts fourth-quarter spending somewhere between a 1% decline and a 2.5% gain, with average budgets at $779, down from $796 (as cited in IndexBox, 2026). Simon-Kucher forecasts a 5.5% drop, with an average budget of $1,018 (Simon-Kucher, 2026).

Note that the average budgets range from $779 to $1,654, which is less a forecast than a weather app with four tabs open. The gap is mostly definitional: household versus individual, gifts only versus gifts plus travel and entertaining. It is still worth remembering before you paste any single figure into a board deck.

Two things are worth holding onto. The NRF’s 4.2% is a revenue number, not a volume number, so some of that growth is simply higher prices. And the independent read agrees with the pessimists on mood: the University of Michigan consumer sentiment index sat at 48 in October, essentially flat against September’s 48.1 and roughly 10% below a year ago, with survey director Joanne Hsu noting that “purchasing power continues to dominate consumer views of the economy” (as cited in Axios, 2026).

Almost every study above was produced by a company that sells something to the people reading it. Simon-Kucher is a pricing consultancy, so a finding that discounting has lost its power is convenient. Adobe sells commerce and analytics software. Deloitte and PwC sell retail advisory work. The NRF is a retail trade association, and optimism is part of the job. Circana sells measurement.

The University of Michigan survey is the exception, and it happens to agree with the gloomiest of them. Treat the direction as real and the decimal places as marketing.

Where the money is actually moving

Adobe’s channel projections are the most useful numbers in the pile. Comparing the 2025 and 2026 holiday seasons, it expects revenue share to grow 17% for social networks and 12% for affiliate and partner channels, versus 4% for paid search and a 13% decline for natural search (Adobe, 2026).

Inside that affiliate channel, the mix is shifting in a way that lines up neatly with the credibility story. Cashback and rewards still hold the largest share of visits at 36% from January through August 2026. Influencer, creator and shoppable media hold 22% and are gaining, with conversion up 22% since the start of the year. Coupon and deal traffic lost momentum, with its monthly share down 32% by August (Adobe, 2026).

Read those two sentences together. Traffic from coupon sites is falling while traffic from creators converts better. Shoppers still want a deal. They have stopped taking the deal’s word for it, and started asking a person.

There is also an AI footnote worth logging: Adobe found AI-referred visitors generated 43% more revenue per visit than other visitors in August 2026, and added to cart at a 32% higher rate (Adobe, 2026). In Canada, interest in AI shopping tools reached 28%, up from 17% last year (as cited in Retail Insider, 2026). Small numbers, steep slope.

What to actually do in the next 60 days

  1. Substantiate every price claim on the page. A was-and-now price with a date beats a vague “compare at,” which is exactly the kind of claim the other 78% of shoppers no longer take at face value (Simon-Kucher, 2026).
  2. Trade discount depth for value that is legible. Bundles, free shipping thresholds, loyalty points and extended returns all read as real in a way that a bigger percentage no longer does. One third of shoppers say shipping and return policies often or always change what they buy (as cited in Barkho, 2026).
  3. Pick your Canadian peak and commit. For most Canadian businesses that is Black Friday weekend through Cyber Monday, not mid-October.
  4. Move budget from coupon affiliates toward creator and shoppable partners, and ask for conversion data rather than reach.
  5. Hold a real December reserve. With 43% of Canadian boomers planning to shop in December, spending the whole budget by December 1 leaves money on the table.
  6. Check your Made in Canada claims. Eighty-four percent of Canadians say they are more likely to buy a gift marked Made in Canada, but 52% add the words “if the price is reasonable” (Retail Council of Canada, 2026).

The Maroon Marketing take

The discount is not dead. The unsupported discount is.

For most of the past decade, a percentage sign was a shortcut around the hard work of explaining why something was worth buying. That shortcut has closed. When fewer than a quarter of shoppers believe your sale is real, the number stops being persuasion and becomes decoration.

What replaces it is unglamorous: honest comparison pricing, clear shipping and returns, loyalty value a customer can actually calculate, and a creator who will say out loud that the thing is good. None of it photographs as well as 50% OFF. All of it survives a shopper’s next question.

And resist the urge to redraw your calendar around an American statistic. The October shift is real in the United States, where Prime Day events have pulled the season forward. In Canada, your customer is still circling Black Friday on the calendar and getting more committed to it, not less. Plan for the market you actually sell to, which is the least exciting advice in this post and probably the most valuable.

References

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