two-price advertising

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun A sales and marketing practice whereby the seller shows two prices, a normal price and a lower special discounted price, in order to attract customers by the apparent saving, but where the "normal" price is in fact a fiction, the goods having never actually been sold and/or offered at that price. (Genuine reduced prices are not considered two-price advertising, only the case where the higher price is invented to look like a saving.)