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People spend more when prices end in .99 (2018)

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Re: People spend more when prices end in .99 (2018)

#161

Post by em-bee »

chrisjj wrote: post #127
em-bee wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be fair, i don't know how much different the chinese management is from a european certification system. we were told to use specific software. and for sure that software is created by some company that may or may not be government owned. i don't know if there was any choice since, as is typical with foreigners, someone will just tell me their recommendation and not try to explain the differences between choices,…

I think the point is less ownership and more remote access.

ah, well, what i had in mind by the term government managed had nothing to do with remote access. i was only thinking about the ownership of the software, not how it works.

Re: People spend more when prices end in .99 (2018)

#162

Post by m463 »

samatman wrote: post #119
m463 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot underneath your comment. For instance, when you buy something and get a receipt - it is not for you the customer. It is to keep the employee honest. If there is no receipt, it might not have been entered into the cash register. Now with electronic payments a lot of this risk has gone away and receipts are becoming optional. Also, I remember some people telling me in their stores, the last digits of a pr…

Customer facing reasons for receipts in no particular order: - Expensing purchases to their employer or self-owned business - Record of sale to be used in returns - Reconciliation of spending with cheques or credit card statements - Budgeting and accounting generally

My suspicion is that most business owners don't care about ANY of that.

even returns - it might actually be enough friction that returns would go down.

for example, why would a donut shop give receipts?

I have a friend who recently opened a bar. He did cash in the beginning, but finally got the electronic payments for the bar installed. He immediately caught a bartender stealing.

He noticed that at the start, the bartender got a lot of tips. But when the electronic payment system went in, the tips were not anywhere near as much. He reviewed everything and found the people in the bar do not tip well.

What the bartender was doing was selling drinks and putting many of the cash sales entirely in the tip jar. When the electronic payment system went in, he wasn't handling as much cash and the lower tipping rate showed up.

Re: People spend more when prices end in .99 (2018)

#163

Post by OJFord »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #138
OJFord wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This method also helped with inventory control. For example, if the total sales for the day ended in .56, it meant 44 (or 144) items were sold, no matter how many customers bought them. That seems like bollocks, who cares about a technique for tracking total number of any items sold? That isn't helpful for inventory management at all? And even if you had only a single product, or you totalled sales separately for s…

>who cares about a technique for tracking total number of any items sold? Pre-digital calculator salesmen? Time is money and being able to do a quick mental math can be helpful before doing a more detailed inventory >you could then just divide by the price, you don't need to coerce the total into being a tally mod 100. That's why they gave more than one reason. Why laser focus on criticizing a single one?

> Pre-digital calculator salesmen?

For what purpose? Say you're a salesman of 7 different products/SKUs; you sold 186 products today. What do you do with that information?

Re: People spend more when prices end in .99 (2018)

#164

Post by johnnyanmac »

OJFord wrote: post #163
johnnyanmac wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>who cares about a technique for tracking total number of any items sold? Pre-digital calculator salesmen? Time is money and being able to do a quick mental math can be helpful before doing a more detailed inventory >you could then just divide by the price, you don't need to coerce the total into being a tally mod 100. That's why they gave more than one reason. Why laser focus on criticizing a single one?

> Pre-digital calculator salesmen? For what purpose? Say you're a salesman of 7 different products/SKUs; you sold 186 products today. What do you do with that information?

You're still hyper fixating on one single point. And I'm not a businessman. I imagine businesses never do one thing for one reason like software functions.

Bankers can tell a lot from a security standpoint based on seemingly frivolous data. Maybe it's the same logic here. If you end every day swelling exactly XX0 products, something is amiss. It at least prompts a deeper investigation, since running through weeks of receipt/data takes more time pre-computer.

Re: People spend more when prices end in .99 (2018)

#165

Post by qup »

jamiek88 wrote: post #160
qup wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact it seems really bad logic to assume that they would all arrive on the same price, had they actually done any real study. There would be some outliers or weird niche customer populations.

Logic doesn’t explain human actions. And never will.

That's a non sequitor, as I'm not trying to explain human actions at all in this case.

Re: People spend more when prices end in .99 (2018)

#166

Post by im3w1l »

dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #148
subroutine wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And many physicians still recommend putting ice on sprained ankles 5x per day to reduce the “harmful” swelling. Even though the abundance of research now shows icing delays the infiltration of proteins, hormones, and cells that aid in healing processes (and can even cause further tissue damage). Practices like this stick around because of the desire to be seen making proactive recommendations with putative benefit. W…

>Practices like this stick around because of the desire to be seen making proactive recommendations with putative benefit One manifestation of this phenomenon in it's extreme form is cancer diagnosis and treatments. Barring a few exceptions, most cancer treatments are useless.

A lot of cancers can be cured.

Re: People spend more when prices end in .99 (2018)

#167

Post by Wowfunhappy »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #139
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually, the .99 price-point started as a clever way to prevent theft, manage inventory, and keep track of sales. The idea was that pricing something at $1.00 might tempt a cashier to pocket the bill, but pricing it at $0.99 meant they’d have to open the register to give change, reducing the risk. Back then, most registers didn’t print receipts. Wouldn't the extra labor required offset any potential savings? (More…

It's a small form of security, and we've traditionally traded some convinence and efficiency to mitigate theft.

Yes but in this case it's a weak form of security, for a significant efficiency loss. I'm sorry but I don't really believe that most businesses would look at this tradeoff and decide it makes sense.

Re: People spend more when prices end in .99 (2018)

#168

Post by johnnyanmac »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #167
johnnyanmac wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a small form of security, and we've traditionally traded some convinence and efficiency to mitigate theft.

Yes but in this case it's a weak form of security, for a significant efficiency loss. I'm sorry but I don't really believe that most businesses would look at this tradeoff and decide it makes sense.

We're talking about a pricing scheme conceived in a time right around the birth of the assembly line. And right around the stock market crashed.

Everything wasn't about raw profits once upon a time. So a small piece of mind makes sense.

Re: People spend more when prices end in .99 (2018)

#169

Post by Gormo »

sigio wrote: post #73
Gormo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of those use cases seem like they'd only work if there were no sales tax to collect.

Sane countries (almost everywhere but the US), have sales-tax included in the consumer-listed prices.

As you point out, sales tax isn't pre-calculated in the US, and yet .99 prices are ubiquitous here.

Re: People spend more when prices end in .99 (2018)

#170

Post by pempem »

Nevermark wrote: post #158
satvikpendem wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, marketers aren't stupid (but it turns out people in general are stupid, enough to fall for this trick and many others).

When it is so well known, at some point it isn’t a “trick” anymore, right? It isn’t as if retailers can fight reality. Or that they can “come clean” by putting fine print under prices explaining why they are ending prices in 9. Which would create a major distraction messing with any sale. It is just real-world reliable wackiness that both sellers and purchasers should be aware of. There is no purely objective way to…

As you consider the issue this phrase I think is the best synopsis of your thoughts: When it is so well known, at some point it isn’t a “trick” anymore, right

And yet we fall for the same tricks again and again. The most politically pressing? The number of people - internationally - who believe in a strongman leader.

MLMs also occur to me. We know MLMs so well that we've literally written laws against them. There are movies, articles, conversations. And yet, every single year, tons of people fall for them.

What other very well-known tricks do people fall for HN?

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