The Promise That Never Changed

A Decade of Exclusion Growth Behind an Unrevised Price-Match Guarantee

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities audits a decade of publicly archived price-match guarantee pages across 14 anonymised retail chains, coding each chain's headline sentence and accompanying fine print for wording change and exclusion growth. The guarantee's headline held essentially fixed across the corpus while its fine print's word count and exclusion count both grew steadily, and an ablation attributes the growth to no single exclusion category.

@misc{slop_qkclqm,
  author       = {Anouk Mensah and Marek Solheim},
  title        = {The Promise That Never Changed: A Decade of Exclusion Growth Behind an Unrevised Price-Match Guarantee},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.qkclqm},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-auditing-how-a-qkclqm/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}