The larger retailers in Australia have been doing this for years too. Not that some of their non-sale stuff is great quality either Some of our outlets used to have designer clothes at deep discount but I haven't been to them for some time.

Yes, I knew this. Also knew it about the Rack, Ross, and so on.

They do sometimes have "real" Nordstom merchandise at the Rack. You can tell by the tags. I bought my wedding gown at the Rack and it was a marked-down Tadashi Shoji from the "real" store -- I could tell because it had a regular Nordstrom tag with multiple reductions on the price. Made-for-the-Rack merch has "compare at" tags.

I can see the truth of what you're saying here about the US. I'm interested regarding Australia also, as I went to one outlet mall in Melbourne on holiday. I only bought one pair of shoes, later saw them for the same price I had paid on Styletread online. So not sure that the price I paid was at all discounted. Was still happy with it/them.
In NZ, we have very few outlet malls, only aware of 1 in Auckland, a city of 1 million people or so. The outlet STORES near me are quite genuine as they are the head offices of those brands and I see the regular priced stuff in retail stores nearby. I'm just really lucky I live within about 2 kilometres of 3 major fashion brands' head offices.
Do any of the U.K. YLF readers know about places like Bicester Village, if the discounts are genuine? I've shopped there a few times on holiday as my only sister lives near Oxford. I was quite pleased with what we got there- Levis, Clark's shoes, Monsoon... But maybe we were tricked!

We have a Patagonia outlet store. I think it has "real" stuff. Until recently it shared a wall with one of the warehouses. Sometimes I would stalk something online, and eventually it would appear in the outlet, but only in XXS and XXL.