Peel the sticker back and find what it used to cost

Three round stickers, stacked on the chest, each one lower and further peeled than the last. Green on top: £8, with a small tear at its corner. Blue underneath: £14. Mustard at the bottom: £22, curling loose at its edge, the most worn of the three.

Three prices, no arithmetic between them. Just what the same copy cost, in order.

Why does a used copy end up wearing three stickers instead of one?

Because nobody peels the old one off before sticking the new one down — it's faster to cover a price than to remove it.

A shop re-pricing stock isn't archiving anything on purpose. It's moving fast: a copy that hasn't sold gets marked down, and the quickest way to mark it down is a fresh sticker slapped over the last one. The layering isn't a record someone chose to keep. It's just what's left over from not bothering to strip the old label first.

What does the order of the layers tell you?

That the copy got cheaper each time, not more expensive — the top sticker is the current price, and everything underneath it is what the shop used to want.

£22 sits at the bottom, most yellowed, most curled — it went on first, when the copy was newest to the shelf. £14 came next, printed over enough of the yellow sticker's edge to still show a strip of it. £8 is on top now, its tear the smallest because it's been through the fewest hands. Read from the top down, the stack is a stock system trying to move a copy on. Read from the bottom up, it's that same copy's whole time on the shelf, in three numbers.

What makes a stack like this look like it happened, rather than a printed price chart?

The unevenness — a torn corner instead of a full peel, one sticker rotated slightly further than the one under it, a curl that's bigger on the oldest layer than the newest.

A price chart lines its numbers up. Three stickers applied by different hands on different days don't — each one goes down slightly off the last, at whatever angle felt fast in the moment, and each one ages a different amount depending how long it sat exposed before being covered. The mustard sticker's heavy curl isn't styling. It's just the sticker that's had the most time to lift.

Who owns a design like a round price sticker with a number on it?

Nobody, as printed here — a plain circular sticker in a flat colour with a price on it is about as close to boilerplate as retail packaging gets, and there's no shop name or logo anywhere on this one.

An actual shop's own sticker — their specific colour-coding system, their printed shop name — is a different matter, and belongs to whoever runs that till the way any branded stock label does. If a real one is genuinely the point, clearing it is part of the job. This version keeps the layering and drops the branding, which is usually the better trade anyway: a sticker with somebody else's shop name on it is a sticker a lot of people have already peeled off something of their own.

Does the layered-sticker idea work for anything other than a used copy of a game?

Yes — anything re-priced in place rather than re-labelled from scratch carries the same stack: a record shop's stickers on a slow-selling LP, a market stall's tag re-marked through a weekend, a clearance rail where three different sale prices are visible under the current one.

What all of them share is the same shortcut — cover, don't remove — and the same tell it leaves behind: the oldest number is the most worn one, always at the bottom of the stack. A shop settling a used copy's value a different way entirely converts a graded condition straight into store credit instead of dropping a price at all — that's a slip written once at the counter, not a sticker re-applied over a shelf life. Further back, before the copy had a price to mark down at all, a deposit slip fixed a date for it before it existed to price.

Isn't three price cuts on one sticker just proof the shop couldn't sell it?

That's one way to read it, but the layers are doing something more specific than tracking a failure to sell — they're the only visible record of how the shop valued the copy over time, since nothing else about a used case changes to show its age.

A copy that sold on day one would carry a single sticker and nothing to peel. Three layers means three separate decisions, each one made by someone looking at that exact copy and deciding what it was worth right then. That's not embarrassing information. It's the only price history the object has.

Does it print well?

Yes — a round sticker with a hard die-cut edge and flat colour underneath a plain number is a strong, simple shape, which is exactly what survives fabric printing best.

Keep every edge crisp rather than softened — a die-cut sticker has a clean boundary even where it's torn, and blurring that edge turns a sticker into a painted circle. The distressed wear belongs on the stickers themselves, not on the shirt underneath them; a worn garment competing with a worn sticker muddies the one detail carrying the story. Forest green, slate blue and mustard read clean as three flat spot colours on white, and three inks is exactly what this design needs — one per sticker.

How do I get one made?

Describe the stack at JustOG — how many prices, how far each one's peeled, which number sits on top now. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

£8 is what it costs today. £22 is still under there, for whoever bothers to look.