What Does Compare At Mean? It Depends Which Company Printed the Tag

In 1964, the Federal Trade Commission wrote a short story about a pen. A fictional retailer named Doe sells Brand X fountain pens and advertises “Brand X Pens, Price Elsewhere $10, Our Price $7.50.” Whether Doe is honest, the Guides Against Deceptive Pricing say, depends on one thing: whether pens like his actually sell for $10 where his customers shop.

The pen never went away. It’s hanging on a rack near you right now.

Say you’re at a T.J. Maxx this week, because everyone is. Saks Off 5th is liquidating its online discount business, Retail Dive reported, and Nordstrom Rack and TJX are opening stores to absorb its shoppers. You pull a jacket off the fall rack and the tag reads $39.99, with “Compare At $88” printed above it. Compare at where? Who checked?

The verdict, up top: nobody’s fine print promises that this jacket ever sold for $88 anywhere. We read the comparison-pricing pages of four off-price chains on September 17, 2026, and each one anchors its number to “the same or similar” merchandise somewhere else. The differences are in the verbs.

Tag phrase	Chain	Their words, read September 17, 2026	The load-bearing verb
Compare At	T.J. Maxx, Marshalls	“prices at which we believe substantial sales of the same or a similar item have been made”	believe
Compare At	Nordstrom Rack	“what the item, or similar item, was originally offered for by Nordstrom or elsewhere in the market”	offered
Comparable Value	Ross	“a recent documented selling price of the same or similar product”	documented
Unread	Burlington	Burlington’s site tells our crawler not to visit, so we can’t quote its page	none we can print

That last row is a disclosure, not a dig. We don’t infer anything from a page we couldn’t read.

Is the Compare At price the original price of the item?

No off-price chain’s own fine print calls Compare At an original price: T.J. Maxx describes an estimate of other retailers’ prices for “the same or similar items,” Nordstrom Rack ties its number to what an item “was originally offered for by Nordstrom or elsewhere in the market,” and Ross points to “the same or similar product” in full-price stores. An original price would mean this garment, at that number, on a shelf where somebody could’ve bought it. None of the three sentences commits to that. The federal pamphlet saw this coming: Guide II blesses comparable-merchandise pricing only when the other merchandise is “of essentially similar quality and obtainable in the area,” and it walks Doe through the failure case with a second pen. Retailer Doe advertises “Comparable Value $15.00,” and the FTC rules that “unless a reasonable number of the principal outlets in the area are offering Brand Y, an essentially similar pen, for that price, this advertisement would be deceptive.”

Guides aren’t statutes, to be fair. They’re the FTC explaining what it considers misleading, and the private lawsuits below borrow their logic through state consumer laws.

T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, in their own words

The T.J. Maxx comparison-pricing page defines its numbers as “references to regular retail prices of the same or similar items at full-price department or specialty retailers,” and adds: “Where identical items are not available, we compare to products of a similar type, quality and style.” Marshalls, same parent company, publishes the same text. The verb doing the work sits mid-sentence, where the page says the goal is a comparison “based on prices at which we believe substantial sales of the same or a similar item have been made.” Believe. Not checked, not recorded. The wording used to be blunter. When Staci Chester sued TJX in 2015, the definition on file described “our buying staff’s estimate of the regular, retail price at which a comparable item … may have been sold,” and the company settled for roughly $8.5 million in store credit without admitting anything. A second suit, Fuentes v. TJX, filed in a Florida federal court in July 2018, called the tags “phantom markdown[s]” that “mislead consumers into believing they are purchasing merchandise at a discount,” per the Truth in Advertising case tracker. The current, softer sentence is what survived all that.

Nordstrom Rack, in its own words

Nordstrom Rack’s customer service page stacks two hedges into one sentence: the number reflects what an item “was originally offered for by Nordstrom or elsewhere in the market, which may have been reported to us by the manufacturer.” Offered is the first hedge, because an asking price isn’t a selling price, and the 1964 guides scold sellers on exactly that distinction. Reported by the manufacturer is the second, and it’s the one worth sitting with. The chain that printed the tag is telling you it may not have generated the number itself. The manufacturer with the pricing story to tell did. Rack’s tag has seen a courtroom too. Kevin Branca sued in federal court in San Diego over Compare At tags on items he bought in 2013, a judge let the case proceed in 2014, later rulings trimmed it, and we found no settlement on the docket. If you want to know what the merchandise side of that footnote looks like, we’ve mapped Rack’s made-for-Rack labels separately.

Ross, in its own words

Ross makes the strongest claim of the three, and it’s the one chain that changed its tag’s vocabulary under legal pressure. Today its comparison-pricing page says the number reflects “a recent documented selling price of the same or similar product in full-price department stores or specialty stores.” Documented beats believe, on paper. Same page, four words later: the comparisons “should be used for general information only.” Now run the tape back. Before 2019, the same tags said “Compare At,” and a class action filed in June 2015, Jacobo v. Ross, called those numbers inflated. Per the Truth in Advertising settlement entry, Ross agreed to a $4,854,000 fund, paid class members in merchandise certificates convertible to cash at 75 percent of face value, and, this is the part you can still see in the store, replaced “Compare At” with “Comparable Value” on its price tags. Same tag, same rack, two readings a few years apart. The number’s name changed because a lawsuit ended, not because the math did.

How should you read a Compare At tag this fall?

Treat a Compare At or Comparable Value number as the seller’s pitch about a similar item somewhere else, search the brand’s own site for the style name on the tag before you pay, and judge the garment at the bottom number, the one the register will charge. If the style exists at full price elsewhere, the gap is real and you can size it yourself. If the brand’s site has never heard of it, the top number was written about a cousin, and the return policy on the bottom number matters more than the markdown.

What we can’t tell you is what your store printed this week. We read four corporate pages on one dated afternoon, from a desk, and pages get rewritten without notice.

In-store signage can lag the website, and we didn’t measure a single rack against a single department store shelf. The chains’ lawyers wrote those sentences carefully, and we’ve quoted them carefully, which is a different thing from auditing them.

The reason to care this September is that the number of tags is about to grow. With Saks Off 5th mostly gone, Nordstrom Rack is opening 23 stores this year and TJX is aiming at 7,000 worldwide, and every one of those racks will greet the migrating shoppers with a two-line tag. Glenn McMahon of MAC Advisory and Consulting sized up the collapsed competitor with a sentence that reads like a warning label for the whole aisle, telling Retail Dive: “Just having last year’s merchandise at 40%, 50% off in an outlet store is not a business plan.”