The Specials Scorecard
May 2026 – Sep 2026 · 172 cities · updated 2026-09-18
of 138,661 advertised specials we checked across the US & Canada
46.6%
were not below the government's published average price
The other 53.4% were genuine — below the StatCan/BLS average for their cut and region. That's the point of checking.
What this measures — in one breath
An advertised special = a flyer/online offer that classifies to one of Lowtein's tracked staple cuts, carries an honest per-unit price, and has a published government average (StatCan/BLS) for its cut and region. Offers without a government series or a derivable unit price are excluded — not counted either way. Eggs and fluid milk are also excluded: advertised offers there skew heavily premium-tier (organic, free-range, small-format) while the government series tracks the conventional tier — comparing them would measure the tier gap, not the special.
“Not below the average” is arithmetic, not an accusation: a price can sit above the average for good reasons (premium tier, small format, regional costs). We publish the aggregate so you can calibrate how much weight a “special” sticker deserves — city-level detail lives on every city page, priced item by item.
By country
By category
By month
Method: every offer is normalized to the government series' unit (per lb / L / dozen / 100 g) through the same pipeline that prices the city pages, then compared to the StatCan (Canada) or BLS (US) published average for its cut and region. No retailer-level claims are made or implied. Each week is scored once, against the government averages in effect at the time, then frozen — later baseline updates never re-write history. (The May–July 2026 seed period was scored against July's baselines.) Data © Lowtein, CC BY 4.0 — cite “Lowtein Specials Scorecard” with a link.