We’ve all seen a store with a huge “Going Out of Business Sale” sign — except that the sign is faded and tattered and has obviously been there for years. The store, in fact, is jammed with new products and seems to be doing a lot of business.

Is it a marketing ploy? The place decided not to go out of business after all, but never got around to taking down the sign?

Farewell tours typically turn out to be little more than marketing gimmicks to raise ticket prices.

The rock dinosaurs Aerosmith have been sending the same mixed messages: They announced a “farewell” tour late last year, but have been broadly hinting it might actually be no such thing. “Starting a tour that says ‘the final tour’ is OK,” guitarist Joe Perry told Billboard last year, “but to think there’s going to be a last Aerosmith gig? I do have a feeling that there’ll be a tour that we’ll call the final tour — but when will it end? That I can’t say.”

“We keep talking about what we may call a farewell tour, but based on the KISS approach, that could go on for three to five years,” bassist Brad Whitford added. “We are seriously looking at that, just based on our age and everything.”

A number of bands and artists seem to have the same problem, whatever it is: They announce their farewell tour, then keep right on touring after said “farewell” tour. Some bands have even had multiple farewell tours. Then there are those acts who are still touring with no end in sight, but might have done well to hang it up a long time ago.

Farewell tours typically turn out to be little more than marketing gimmicks to raise ticket prices and put people in seats with empty promises.

Related: How Joe Cocker Outdid The Beatles

Here are some artists that just don’t know when enough is enough:

KISS. After their 1979 Dynasty tour, KISS laid low until their 1996-97 Reunion tour, which was a smash success. Ticket sales for the followup, though — Psycho Circus World Tour — were alarmingly poor. So they staged a farewell tour in 2000-2001, followed almost immediately by the World Domination Tour in 2003.

Guitarist and singer Paul Stanley later revealed during an interview on the “Talk is Jericho” podcast that the “farewell” tour was an attempt to “put KISS out of its misery.” The making of the “Psycho Circus” album and the following tour soured everyone in the band. “‘Psycho Circus’ was such a nightmare to make that it kind of turned me off to the whole idea of making another album,” said Stanley. “Everything was wrong [during the making of ‘Psycho Circus’].”

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Stanley revealed that bringing two former members back to the band led to disaster and a serious desire to let the band become a memory. “By the ‘farewell’ tour, I thought we were disappointing people. People may have loved the excitement and the novelty of seeing us again, but many nights we weren’t very good,” said Stanley. Instead of taking that as a sign to retire the classic rock band, they kept on trucking. They still tour to this day.

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The Eagles. The wildly successful country rock band didn’t have a formal farewell tour when they broke up in 1980; divergent solo projects and internecine bickering provoked founding member Don Henley to announce bitterly that hell would freeze over before The Eagles reunited. More than a decade later, though, The Eagles mended fences — and in 1994, with their tongues firmly in their cheeks, they embarked on their Hell Freezes Over reunion tour.

Since then, they made the “farewell” rounds again with Farewell Tour I in 2005, followed by a new album and two more world tours. After the death of Glenn Frey last year, Henley announced the band was hanging things up for good. We’ll see about that.

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The Who. Fans feared the band’s demise as early as 1976, when drummer Keith Moon’s erratic behavior and drug addiction had gotten so out-of-control he passed out during more than one show. When Moon died of an overdose in 1978, fans’ fears seemed to have come true, but drummer Kenny Jones joined the band a few months later and The Who carried on.

But by 1982, lead singer Roger Daltrey was so worried about guitarist Pete Townshend’s heroin, cocaine, and alcohol use he talked the band into staging a farewell tour.

“I was responsible for getting [Townshend] back on the road after 1978,” Daltrey told Rolling Stone in 1982. “And after three tours of America, he was a bloody junkie. I felt responsible for that. I think enough of him to stop The Who.” The farewell tour wrapped up in December 1982; fans were thankful they’d ended while still in their prime, but grieved the loss of the legendary British rockers.

They needn’t have worried. The Who reunited a scant three years later for 1985’s Live Aid and started touring again in 1989. Last year they celebrated their 50th anniversary with their tenth “farewell” tour. And maybe this one will stick: Daltrey and Townshend are the only two surviving members of the original lineup — and they’re both in their 70s.

Daltrey is still recovering from a nasty bout with meningitis — and thanks to The Who’s 1976 Guinness World Record status as the loudest rock band in the world, Townshend has struggled with tinnitus and other health issues for years.

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Ozzy Osbourne. Rocker Ozzy Osbourne went on his farewell tour all the way back in 1992. It was given the catchy title, No More Tours. Osbourne said he wanted off the stage so he could spend more time at home with his family. It didn’t seem to stick. Less than three years later, Ozzy went on tour again. The rock star at least had a good sense of humor about the whole thing. He called his comeback tour “Retirement Sucks!”

Ozzy still takes to the stage and gives it his all, but recent performances are evidence the rocker might have been wise to retire his act long ago.

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Barbra Streisand. The Broadway, film, and recording sensation announced her farewell tour back in 2000, citing a long struggle with stage fright. “It feels like time to say goodbye to this part of my life,” she said during the farewell tour’s final performance. She provided a trip down memory lane during the short, four-stop tour, highlighting hits from her dozens of gold and platinum albums, and said she looked forward to a nice, quiet retirement with husband James Brolin. Retirement seemed like a good idea, as Streisand’s voice was simply not what it once was.

Related: Streisand’s Stealth Campaign for Merrick Garland

If you don’t remember any of this, it may be because you’ve seen her in one of her multiple tours since then — or have tickets to one of her upcoming shows in New York City this May.