When are furniture sales actually real?

The real windows are predictable: holiday weekends (Presidents Day, Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day), Black Friday through Cyber Monday, and the model-changeover months — late winter for indoor furniture, August–September for patio clearance. Outside those windows, a perpetual "70% off" banner usually marks a fake anchor price. The test for any deal is the everyday price: track the piece for a couple of weeks, and if the sale price is the price it always sells at, it is not a sale.