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I don't know if this is a useful exercise, but the main reason is psychological pricing [0]. If you say that all prices should end in .99 due to some other rea
by ptaipale 12y ago
I don't know if this is a useful exercise, but the main reason is psychological pricing [0].
If you say that all prices should end in .99 due to some other reason than having the customers perceive the prices as lower, one possibility is that if all prices really end in .99 with no exceptions, then you can do a check on the number of items delivered based on the cent digits of total price: "the sum is $82.91 - were there nine dishes sold?"
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing
- k1t 12y agoAlthough, in the UK some big chains moved away [0] from the .99 prices because everybody knows that it's just a marketing trick and having round numbers seems more 'honest'. That was a few years ago, maybe they've gone back to it since... [0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8159072.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8159072.stm
- ptaipale 12y agoI suppose the .99 psychological pricing works as good as ever (UK and elsewhere). A somewhat silly angle to this is that while most items are sold with prices in euros and cents, over here automobile fuels are sold with three digits after the euro in the price. I.e. a litre of petrol/gas is 1.399€, not 1.39€. The third nine is generally shown smaller in the price ads. With the volumes of trade being large and margins small, this makes a lot of difference to gas station chains. This is even more funny because elsewhere even the euro cent is too small. We don't use euro cent coins here; the rationale by government was to reduce the cost of handling small coins. Thus all shopping is rounded to the nearest 5 cents, and this also applies to credit/debit card payments.