Cheapest and dearest offer in the same department, priced on 7 November 2026

● Prices recorded on 07/11/2026 — single day, no trend claim

On 7 November 2026 our price series covered 71 shop-and-department pairs — 12 departments across 40 shops — and 363 live offers. It is the first day of the series. There is no earlier day to compare it with, and this article claims no movement in either direction: everything below describes that one day.

What the numbers say

Across the whole day, 14 of the 71 shop-and-department pairs hold a dearest offer that costs at least five times their cheapest — that is 20% of them. Restricting to pairs that carry at least 8 offers, the number is 7, so the gap is not an artefact of a two-item shelf. In 10 pairs the median offer already costs three times the cheapest, which means the cheap item is the exception in that department, not the rule.

The median of all medians that day was RM149.00. That is a real number of the catalogue, but it is a bad comparison between shops: a shop whose offers are mostly small hardware will always look cheaper than a shop selling furniture, whatever either of them does with its prices.

The gap measures the shelf, not the discount

The widest pair that day is Mr DIY in Home & Garden — but read it as a range of products, not as a price cut. Its cheapest live offer is JOMOO Connecting Hose H5388-040101C-I011 (Stainless Steel 304 Flexible Water Hose) at RM8.05; its dearest is JOMOO Shower System 36603-724/HBS-1 with Temperature Display & Piano Key Controls at RM1,959.30. Nothing happened to either price. Two different objects sit on the same shelf, and the ratio between them measures how wide that shelf is.

That distinction matters when you shop. A “deals” site that quotes the average or the lowest price of a department without saying which product it is describing is telling you something about the assortment. We publish the cheapest, the median and the dearest of every pair instead, so you can see whether the number applies to what you actually want to buy.

SELECT p.store_id, p.category_value, p.offers,
       p.min_price, p.median_price, p.max_price,
       round(p.max_price / NULLIF(p.min_price, 0), 1) AS dearest_over_cheapest
  FROM price_snapshots p
 WHERE p.day = '2026-11-07' AND p.min_price > 0
 ORDER BY dearest_over_cheapest DESC;