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Two skeptical T.J. Maxx customers looked into the retailer's signature "compare at" price tags and found that the retailer basically guesses at what each item might go for at full retail and marks that as the comparable price for each discount item it sells. Law360 reports that they're now suing the company in California federal court for misleading customers into thinking they were getting bigger deals than they actually got.

Staci Chester and Daniel Friedman read T.J. Maxx's price tags and assumed, as most people do, that the two prices compared what the item was worth at full retail vs. what T.J. Maxx was selling it for. However, after plenty of digging on the website, they found those "compare at" prices were not necessarily factual at all, but rather estimates that T.J. Maxx's buying staff personally come up with.

"After reading T.J. Maxx's interpretation of their 'compare at' pricing, I really don't know what that price is, or where they came up with it ... it appears that it's just there to make me feel good about my purchase," Chester and Friedman's lawyer, Christopher Morosoff, told Law360. "In general, we think they need to be more clear about what their 'compare at' price is, and where they came up with it."

Morosoff said that customers typically expect T.J. Maxx merchandise to be between 20% to 60% less than full retail prices. The lawsuit claims that potentially hundreds of thousands of Californian shoppers have been affected by the misleading price tags.