Carl Dunne
To sell a bill of goods today usually means 'to put something over on someone'. This usage appears to have arisen in the 1920s. No one knows exactly how it got started; but as long as there have been commercial transactions there has been fraud, so the association of the two in this phrase apparently struck a chord. Inducing people to order a bill of goods by exaggerating their quality, and even taking money for goods that never materialize at all, are familiar concepts, as centuries of court records attest. In a rather colorful example, a 1949 case in the North Carolina Supreme Court concerned a textile mill's complaint that it had been fraudulently induced to purchase a bill of goods including an item for 148,227 pounds of dyed cotton, only to find "that 100 bales of said merchandise . . . was not dyed cotton but was of a quality greatly inferior, which was known as dyed waste or 'frog hair', as the defendants then well knew."
Although bill of goods in the current sense of 'something fraudulent, deceptive, exaggerated' is usually associated with the verb sell, it is often used alone. A recent law review article about proposed "patient bill of rights" legislation contains this example, which manages to wrap together several meanings of bill: "The bill of rights formulation has also allowed for further permutations--with Democrats deriding Republican proposals as a bill of goods and a bill of wrongs, and Republicans arguing that the Democrats' approach creates a lawyer's right to bill."