Office deals for your damn spare room

Office pricing runs on the school calendar whether or not anyone in your house is at school. Office supply discounting concentrates around the back-to-school period from July through September, with a secondary peak in January. Which means the same reduction on a printer or a chair is entirely ordinary in August and genuinely unusual in April. Two windows a year do most of the work in this department, and everything outside them is either a real deal or a fake one — which is the whole damn reason we score.

How we score office

We weight the timing of a discount alongside its depth, so reductions during back-to-school and January promotional periods score lower than equivalent drops outside them. Consumables like ink, toner and paper are scored on price per unit, since printer consumable pricing varies substantially by yield and pack configuration, making headline price a poor comparison — a cheap cartridge with half the page yield is not cheap. Furniture is scored on price history with rank weighted heavily, because the damn office chair long tail is a swamp.

How the Damn Good Score works →