Except that isn’t the normal sales price. According to Camel Camel Camel, a site that Ms. Cheng advises people to check every time they encounter an online deal, Amazon has been selling the Breville toaster oven for $250 for months. Best Buy, Crate & Barrel, and several other national retailers are also offering it for that price. (This week, Macy’s also changed its sale price to $250.)

Image A Breville Smart toaster

So where did Macy’s $417 regular price come from? Julie Strider Fukami, a spokeswoman, said in an email that Macy’s advertised “regular” prices are “based on many different factors, including the cost of the item, overhead, benefits we offer ... as well as our ability to offer the item at a lower price during sale events.” She noted, though, that as Macy’s explains in fine print on its site, “regular” prices may never have resulted in any actual sales. To me, this looks fishy — posting a “regular” price that resulted in potentially zero sales seems like a tactic meant to make you feel like you’re getting a deal, even when Macy’s sale price is actually more expensive than other retailers’ ordinary prices.

The Breville is one of the best-rated toaster ovens on the market, which suggests another reason to be skeptical of such a deal.

“The stuff that’s really good is almost never on sale,” said Brian Lam, the founder of The Wirecutter and The Sweethome. Mr. Lam has been looking at holiday deals for years, and when he comes upon a genuinely huge discount, he has found that it often comes with a huge catch: The item isn’t very good to begin with, and is usually not worth buying at any price.

Consider the 55-inch, ultra-high-definition Samsung television that Best Buy was selling for just $899 on Black Friday. It had been discounted $500 from its original price, and with a promise of a high-resolution, so-called 4K screen, it looked like it could be the deal of the century. (Best Buy has since raised the price to $1,299.)

But when The Wirecutter staff looked into that model, they found that the Samsung set had a very bad case of “motion blur,” a common effect in flat-panel displays in which images lose their sharpness when they’re in motion. One review found that the Samsung’s “4K resolution only holds true on a static picture; on a moving image you’d be lucky to get 1K.”