Sheplers is a well-regarded western wear retailer. There are some 23 brick-and-mortar Shelpers stores in nine states along with a huge on-line retail business. A lot of guys (and gals) have purchased western wear, including boots, from Sheplers over the years. What may not be well-known, however, is that Sheplers was purchased by “Boot Barn Holdings” in July, 2015, and Boot Barn’s on-line retailing schemes are appearing on Shepler’s website. Those schemes are deceiving, so I am calling them out. Here’s what I have observed …

If you sign up for marketing email from Sheplers, frequently (at least three times each week), you will receive ads panting breathlessly to offer you such a great deal that you can’t pass it up. “Final Hours! Everything on sale! Take an additional 20% off sitewide!”

Here’s where I call B.S.

First, it says “everything on sale.” However, they make up whatever sale “discount” they want to offer. See below how this hocus-pocus sleight-of-math computes.

Second, they state “take an additional 20% off”. Additional 20% off? Wow, sounds great, doesn’t it? However, this is more hocus-pocus sleight of math. Here’s the meat of the issue with examples.

Let’s say you’re looking at the new retro Chippewa Men’s 1937 engineer boot. On Chippewa boots website, the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) is $599.95.Then you look at Sheplers.com pricing. Their website (clipped today for commentary/review purposes) shows this boot “original price” to be $866.99:WTF??? How in the world do they come up with the “original price” of this boot to be $866.99?

They make up the “original price” by applying marketing/sales scheming reverse math.

Here is how they do it: they want to target a sales price just a little lower than the real MSRP. They engineer the math by making up the “original price” of the boot as shown in the image to the right (clipped for journalistic review purposes).The “sale price” after all discounts and marketing scheme math is $579.95. The “20%” discount is applied against $724.90, which is the intermediate result when subtracting the made-up “original price” of $866.95 less the made-up “sale” discount of $142.05.

Then they apply the breathless 20% discount to that intermediate result to come up with the target price for which to sell these boots on the website: $579.95.

Do the math yourself. The “sale” price of these boots on sheplers.com is only $20 off the full MSRP of $599.95. That is really just a little over 3% discount, not the 33% as claimed.

There is no such thing as an “original price” of anything. The only real comparable pricing is the MSRP. Some “original price” is a hocus-pocus patooey-phony pricing scheme.

You do not have to be a math whiz to realize that they attempting to pull the sheepskin over your eyes. Don’t fall for it.

If you like the products that sheplers.com sells, by all means, buy them. Their order handling and shipping are reliable and good. Their response by email to customer service inquiries is poor. They are among the many who have low-skilled people who provide cut-and-paste pre-determined answers to inquiries sent by email which is an annoying practice employed by many on-line retailers. But overall, sheplers.com is fairly reliable as a vendor. Just don’t trust their math and breathless, panting, marketing schemes with funny math. It doesn’t compute.

Life is short: do the math — learn to distinguish a true value from misleading sleight-of-math employed by some on-line retailers.