Outlet malls carry a reputation for deep discounts on well-known brands, but the relationship between outlet merchandise and a brand's regular retail stock is more complicated than the discounted price tags suggest.
Outlet stores generally stock a mix of two distinct categories of product, and telling them apart matters for judging whether a price is actually a good deal. The first category is genuine overstock or past-season merchandise transferred from regular retail locations, which was originally sold at full price elsewhere. The second, and now more common, category is merchandise manufactured specifically for outlet stores, built to a lower cost and never sold at a regular retail location at all.
Manufacturers are not always required to disclose which category an item falls into, but a few signals tend to point toward outlet-specific production.
Neither category of merchandise is inherently a bad purchase, but the listed discount percentage means less when the reference price was never a real retail price to begin with.
Outlet pricing is most reliably a good deal on items in the first category: genuine past-season or overstock goods from a brand's regular line. These are more common in categories with frequent seasonal turnover, such as clothing and footwear, and less common in categories like electronics or furniture. Asking a store associate whether a specific item was ever sold at the brand's full-price stores is a reasonable question and one that associates can often answer directly.
Outlet malls can still offer genuine savings, but treating every price tag as a discount from an equivalent full-price item leads to an inflated sense of how much is actually being saved. Judging the underlying quality and comparing it to a full-price equivalent, rather than trusting the percentage off alone, is the more reliable way to shop them.