If only the final price mattered, shops wouldn't be advertising such discounts.
I’d rather see education in schools teaching people that discounts are sales tactics that should be ignored rather than laws governing discounts, which would be costlier to implement and enforce.
If you think discounts are completely meaningless, then completely banning advertising with discounts is very easy to implement and enforce. Much easier than to properly educate everybody how to arm themselves against deceptive sales practices (though I agree it would be nice if we could do that).
However, in the developed world, logistics and supply chains have sufficiently developed to allow for minuscule margins on many everyday, low price items that make it uneconomical to negotiate the value of each item to each buyer, so the seller just lists one price for everyone.
In markets in poorer countries, the seller might not do that, and it might be worth their time to negotiate each sale. If they say to one buyer "I'll sell this to you for 50% off today, and charges him the same price as yesterday, and the buyer agrees to buy", who is harmed?
Price discrimination is a natural part of markets, and the only reason it hasn't been happening is because it wasn't worth the retailers time in the US. But with automated systems coming into place, there is no more labor cost and so it's becoming economical to price discriminate again.
"I'd rather see education in schools teaching people that $instances-of-abuse are members of $family-of-methods-of-abuse that one should protect themselves against".
Funny how for almost everything else, the abuse itself is considered both illegal and morally repugnant, yet abusive sales tactics are legally above board and the profession itself is considered respectable.
If I'm a seller, I can raise the price 100% at 10AM, and then put a sign that says 70% off. And then the next day, I can reduce the price 100%. The very use of ambiguous wording is a signal that it's a sales tactic.
No one advertises 50% off the median average sale price in the past 30 days, because then it would be abuse. But that's not what any seller advertises. Stating that someone else saved Y dollars is also ambiguous. Saved compared to what?
Booking.com claiming so and so is selling out quickly! What is quickly defined as?
Until there are falsifiable metrics being falsified, I don't see what the abuse is.
