The Discount Sign Said Was and Now. A Rival Disagreed.

The situation

Deepa found out about the complaint the way most business owners find out about problems they did not know they had: an email from her general manager, forwarded with no comment except 'we need to talk about this,' attaching a letter from a competitor's lawyer. The letter alleged that the was-and-now pricing on Deepa's website, the strikethrough regular price next to the sale price on dozens of kayaks, paddleboards, and camping gear, did not reflect real prices the company had actually charged. Deepa read it twice standing in her stockroom before she understood what it meant.

Deepa's company sold outdoor recreation equipment online and out of a retail showroom in Gravenhurst, with annual revenue that had grown past twelve million dollars over eight years. She had built the business herself, but a silent investor, Antonio, a professional engineer who had put early capital into the company in exchange for a minority stake, had never been involved in day-to-day decisions and rarely asked questions. That was about to change, because a complaint alleging deceptive pricing was exactly the kind of reputational and financial risk a passive investor pays close attention to.

The complaint had come from a competing outdoor retailer whose owner, Carmela, taught part-time as a university professor and ran the shop on the side, and who had apparently been monitoring Deepa's site for months, taking screenshots of the same product listed at a discount price for weeks at a stretch, always against the same higher was price. Carmela's lawyer argued that a discount only means something if the higher price was genuinely offered for a meaningful period beforehand, and that constantly discounted items with a permanently inflated was price amount to a false impression of savings that never actually existed.

Deepa's first instinct was to dismiss it as a competitor trying to cause trouble, and there was likely some truth to that. But when she asked her marketing team how the was prices were actually set, the answer was vague: a mix of manufacturer suggested prices, occasional one-off full-price sales, and, for some items, prices nobody could clearly trace back to an actual sale at all. She did not yet know how serious the exposure was. What she wanted from us, more than anything, was to understand the process ahead of her and roughly what it would cost, before deciding how hard to fight.

What made this urgent

Pricing practices like this fall under rules, both under Ontario's consumer protection legislation and under the federal framework governing misleading representations, that generally require a discount claim to be tied to a genuine prior price, one that was actually offered for a real period of time, not simply set high enough to make every markdown look larger than it was. The specifics vary depending on which regulator or court ultimately looks at the practice, but the underlying idea is consistent: a was price has to mean something, or the now price beside it is misleading regardless of how the retailer intended it.

What made the situation urgent was not any single mislabeled item. It was the pattern. Carmela's evidence covered dozens of products across many weeks, which made this look less like an isolated pricing error and more like a systemic practice, exactly the kind of pattern that regulators and courts treat more seriously than a one-off mistake, because it suggests the misleading impression was built into how the business operated rather than an accident.

There was also a real clock running. A formal complaint to a regulator can sit quietly for months before anything happens, but a competitor represented by counsel who has already gathered screenshots and sent a demand letter is a different kind of urgency, because the next step, if nothing changed, was very likely a complaint escalated to a regulator or the start of a court proceeding, either of which would take the decision out of Deepa's hands and put it in front of a public record.

Deepa was candid with us about what mattered most to her, and it was not simply winning an argument about who was technically right. She wanted to know, in plain terms, what this would cost, how long it would take, and what she needed to do immediately versus what could wait. Antonio, when he was finally looped in, asked almost the same three questions in almost the same order. For a company that size, with a silent investor watching from a distance, predictability mattered nearly as much as the outcome itself, because an open-ended fight would unsettle Antonio and the company's lenders far more than a contained, well-documented resolution.

There was a further wrinkle that made timing matter even more. The company's busiest sales window of the year, when demand for kayaks and paddleboards peaks, was only weeks away, and any prolonged uncertainty about which promotions could legally run would have forced the marketing team to either pause its entire seasonal campaign or gamble on pricing it could not yet defend. Neither option was acceptable to Deepa, which meant the response had to move on a retail calendar, not a litigation calendar, and that constraint shaped almost every decision that followed.

What we did

1. Pulled the full pricing history for every flagged product. Within the first week we went back through the company's point-of-sale and website records for every item Carmela's screenshots referenced, to see how each was price had actually been set and how long it had genuinely applied before any markdown appeared. We treated the letter as an early warning rather than a final judgment, and moved quickly to understand exactly how exposed the company actually was before deciding how to respond to Carmela's lawyer.
2. Sorted the genuine problems from the defensible pricing. That review confirmed some of Carmela's concern was fair: a meaningful number of items had was prices that had never actually been charged for any real stretch of time, set by marketing staff to create a consistent-looking discount rather than pulled from an actual prior selling price. Other items were fine, priced at a genuine manufacturer list price in effect for a long time before the promotion, which let us respond with precision instead of either denying everything or conceding everything.
3. Corrected the practice across the site immediately. We worked with Deepa's marketing team to replace every unsupported was price with either the item's genuine prior selling price or no comparison at all where no defensible prior price existed, and documented each correction with dated records in case the question of good faith ever came up later in the negotiation or, if it came to that, before a regulator.
4. Responded to Carmela's lawyer with a precise, not blanket, answer. We acknowledged the specific items where the pricing history did not hold up and confirmed they had already been corrected, while declining to concede on the items where the was price was genuinely supportable, rather than making an admission that would have gone further than the facts actually showed and weakened the company's position on the items it could properly defend.
5. Kept Deepa and Antonio updated at every stage, not only at the end. Because predictability mattered to both of them as much as the outcome itself, we reported on cost and timeline after each step rather than waiting for a final result, since a client who knows roughly what is coming tends to make calmer decisions than one waiting for a surprise bill or a surprise court date to land.
6. Built a simple internal pricing rule the marketing team could follow without legal help. A was price could only be used if it had been the company's actual selling price for a defined minimum stretch within the prior months, backed by a point-of-sale record; without that record, the item would run as a plain sale price with no comparison, which is safer even if less dramatic. Getting the rule adopted before the seasonal campaign launched meant the company would not repeat this the following spring.

The outcome

The matter closed through a negotiated resolution rather than a regulatory complaint or a lawsuit. Carmela's lawyer accepted the corrections made to the flagged items, along with a written commitment describing how the company would set and document was prices going forward, and the complaint did not proceed further. That outcome avoided the worst-case scenario Deepa had feared when she first read the letter, a public regulatory finding or a court proceeding that could have taken well over a year and drawn attention the company did not want.

The loss was real, even so. The company spent a meaningful five-figure amount on the pricing audit, the site corrections, and the negotiated response, money that would not have been necessary had the original pricing practice been built more carefully from the start. Several long-running promotions had to be pulled and relaunched with corrected pricing, which cost the marketing team real time and, for a few weeks, some lost momentum on items that had been reliable sellers under the old discount structure.

Antonio's reaction, once the matter was resolved, was measured rather than alarmed, largely because the process had unfolded the way Deepa had promised it would: quickly, with clear costs at each stage, and without surprises. That predictability, more than the specific dollar figure, was what kept the relationship between Deepa and her investor steady through a situation that could easily have damaged it.

Deepa's team now reviews every was-and-now claim against an actual pricing record before it goes live, a discipline that did not exist before the complaint. The practice cost the company money and some bruised pride to fix, but it closed off the exposure that had made Carmela's complaint possible in the first place, and it left Deepa able to say, honestly, that every discount on the site now means what it claims to mean.

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