The word guilty does not require a crime. According to google &quot;define guilty&quot;: <i>culpable of or responsible for a specified wrongdoing</i><p>Further it&#x27;s not &quot;price fluctuation&quot;. It&#x27;s a systemic raising of prices prior to a &quot;sale&quot; event, to deceive people into thinking they paid less than they would have by not waiting for the sale.<p>As for the person you are talking about may be acting irrationally, but there are many people who rationally wait for something they want to be on sale - because such a thing should save them some money.  These people are maybe being naive - but without easy access to perfect market information, they have to rely on some sort of price messaging.<p>Finally - articles like this are good for people who shop to get better informed. Even if I were to track the price of something, to know that it used to be cheaper, I have no way of knowing if a given &quot;sale&quot; is a good price since future prices are unpredictable. However if I know of the &quot;price inflation before sale&quot; practice, with data to back it up, I can infer a pattern suggesting whether I should wait longer or not on a purchase.