A shopper who puts an Echo Dot in the cart in November will be shown a percentage, and that percentage will be calculated against $80 [7]. The same speaker sold for $50 on August 20 [8], which makes the increase 60 percent [1]. Run it in the other direction: 40 percent off $80 is $48, two dollars under the August price [2]. The banner is honest arithmetic against a reference point that moved.
The dollar increases are biggest at the top of the range and the percentages biggest at the bottom. The Echo Show 21 went up $100 to $500, which is 25 percent on its old $400 [7][4]. The Fire TV Stick 4K Max went up $25 to $85, which is 41.7 percent on its old $60 [12][3].
Amazon declined to tell WIRED why any of this happened; a spokesperson told CNET it was rising prices in memory and storage components [3]. The line that sat still is the Kindle Scribe, second gen, third gen and colour, which WIRED describes as the more powerful of Amazon's e-reader and notebook devices [6]. Every e-reader-only Kindle moved instead, by $30 to $50, averaging $41 across seven models [5][5]. The Eero 6 and the second-generation Echo Studio also held [9][11]. A component pass-through that skips your highest-capacity hardware has a pricing decision layered on top of it.
What the pricing page does is supply the reference price. What a purchasing sheet does, if anyone keeps one, is store the price you actually paid last time. Those two numbers are now $20 to $100 apart on Amazon hardware [1], and only one of them is on screen when the deal lands.
So put the pre-increase price in one column and the current sale price in the next, for each model you buy more than one of. Sale below the old price, and you wanted the thing anyway: buy. The Echo Show 11 at $190 against a pre-hike $220 is the clean case in WIRED's list [10][7]. Sale above the old price: you are paying for the strike-through. Price never rose: judge it on merit, which is where the older Echo Show 8 at $150 and the unchanged Eero 6 sit [9][11]. Rose with no discount yet: defer, which is the position the Kindle Kids is in at $180 after a $50 increase [5].
The column that tells you something is the pre-hike price. Percentage off is a claim about Amazon's own list, and the buyer who wrote down what they paid in August is the only one in the room able to check it.
