Are 'Sale' Prices in Lebanon Real? We Checked 2,782 Discounts Against Our Price History

What we checked

We looked at listings for laptops, phones, tablets, TVs, monitors, consoles, audio, wearables and cameras, in stock and checked between 1 and 7 November 2026, priced at $20 or more. A listing counted as "on sale" when the shop showed a crossed-out price higher than the current one.

For each sale listing that we had been recording for at least 60 days, we asked three questions. Did we ever record it at the crossed-out price, or within 1% of it? Did it carry a sale tag from the first day we saw it? Did its price change at all while we watched?

The results

Across all 2,782 listings, 14.8% had been sold at their "was" price at some point while we tracked them. 85.2% carried the sale tag from the very first day we recorded them. And 51% never changed price at all. For half of the discounts we checked, the sale price was simply the price.

That is not the same as being overcharged. 75% of these listings were at the lowest price we had ever recorded for them. The current price was usually fine. What was not real, most of the time, was the discount.

Phones are the exception

Phone discounts are the most honest in our data. More than half, 54%, had really been sold at the crossed-out price, and only 16% sat at one unchanged price the whole time. They are also the smallest: the median phone discount was 5%. In our data, a crossed-out phone price far more often describes a real, recent price cut.

Monitors, consoles and audio are the opposite. Fewer than one in ten of those discounts matched a price we ever saw, and two thirds of the listings never moved. A permanent 19% off on a speaker is a display choice, not a sale.

What a fair reading of this looks like

Our records start the day LebTech first saw a listing, which for most shops is sometime between June and October 2026. A shop may have charged the higher price before that. Some shops also use the manufacturer's list price as the crossed-out number. That is a reference price, not a lie, but it is not what the shop used to charge, and it tells you nothing about whether today is a good day to buy.

We are not naming shops here. The point is not that one shop is dishonest. It is that across 136 shops, a crossed-out price is a weak signal on its own.

How to tell a real deal

The discount a shop prints tells you about that shop's own label. What you want to know is how the price compares with other shops today and with what this item cost last month. Those are two things you can check:

• Compare the same model across shops. If the "sale" price matches what three other shops charge without a sale tag, it is the market price.
• Look at the price history on the product page. If the line is flat at the sale price for months, the discount is decoration.
• A real cut usually shows up as a step down in the history and a price below most other shops on the same day.
• Big claimed discounts deserve the most suspicion. Phones, with the smallest claimed discounts, were the most often real. Audio, with the largest, was among the least.

Why this is worth knowing before late November

Shops in Lebanon run Black Friday and end-of-year promotions like everywhere else. Our check ends on 7 November, so it says nothing about how those will look. It does tell you what to compare them with. If a Black Friday price is lower than the lowest price in a listing's history, and lower than other shops on the same day, it is a deal. If it matches a "sale" price that has been on the page since the summer, it is not.