Any idea why Wal-Mart uses .88 in their pricing?
Some retailers use the last digit to encode information about the price, like whether it's controlled by the manufacturer, whether it's a seasonal price, or whether its been marked for clearance.
A Penny Saved: Psychological Pricing
31–40 of 46 posts
Re: A Penny Saved: Psychological Pricing
#32This gave me a great idea for a defensive firefox plugin, maybe even just a greasemonkey script:
Any number that looks like a price (currency sign nearby with a .99) is automatically rounded up to the next integer when displayed in the browser.
Re: A Penny Saved: Psychological Pricing
#33Interestingly, in Australia where taxes are in the sticker price, most retail prices are .99 or .95. When I was in the US, where the taxes mean you have no idea what the checkout price will be, it was weird to see so many prices at .29, 39, .59 and so on. I assume it was tax-related, because forking over cash and getting shitty amounts of coins back is not something that's common in Australia, but a necessity of the…
> There's no 'leave a penny/take a penny' tray in Australian retail culture, for example. There wasn't one when I was a boy in the US, at least not that I remember. I think that they started to be a thing around the time I graduated college, and of course they're now everywhere. Just today I paid for some coffee and got back an integer number of dollars because the clerk made up the cost. Of course, it was in her int…
I down-modded you because references to when you were a boy and when you were in college without actual dates are meaningless to everyone else.
Re: A Penny Saved: Psychological Pricing
#34I love buying when prices are quoted in even amounts, especially if they include the tax. It makes me sad that we humans are so affected by tactics like this and that sellers (rationally) take advantage of them.
Outside the US, prices are more normal. I suspect that the tax issue in particular reflects the fact that taxes are different in every different city in the US, which makes tax-included prices hard to advertise.
Re: A Penny Saved: Psychological Pricing
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's no 'leave a penny/take a penny' tray in Australian retail culture, for example. There wasn't one when I was a boy in the US, at least not that I remember. I think that they started to be a thing around the time I graduated college, and of course they're now everywhere. Just today I paid for some coffee and got back an integer number of dollars because the clerk made up the cost. Of course, it was in her int…
I down-modded you because references to when you were a boy and when you were in college without actual dates are meaningless to everyone else.
I really don't think that's worthy of a downvote, though. Being deliberately obscure with dates and ages can even be interesting sometimes.
Re: A Penny Saved: Psychological Pricing
#36British supermarkets have plenty of products priced at round pounds, or £x.50. This is particularly the case with BOGOF deals, e.g. two packets of cheese might cost £3 whereas individually they may cost £1.89 each. Why is this? There are two reasons. The round price is an honest price, nobody has tried to fiddle the price to look less than it is by putting the 99 in there. Secondly, for those shopping to a budget, e.…
> Why would a retailer want to put (say) a thousand items through the till at £x.95 when they might as well be £x.99?
For cash-handling shops, with .95 prices there is a higher probability that the final total will end on a 'silver coin' mark, rather than a 'copper'.
Handling copper coins is extremely expensive due to their bulk versus low value. The fewer the better.
Re: A Penny Saved: Psychological Pricing
#37I always round prices up that end with .9x. On Kickstarter when prices are $79 I count them as $80. Saving me that minor calculation makes me more likely to buy something, it simply removes an annoyance. Is that really un-normal?
I find unrounded prices annoying as well because it forces me to perform a number of extra calculations. If I look at for example the price of Github being $7/month I immediately think Thank you.
When I look at the price of a pack of gummy bears and it's $1.96 I am forced to think $2. Then I have to keep in the back of my mind the fact that if I pay with cash I'm getting bad change and then I think what am I going to do with 4 cents?
I may get overly annoyed by this but please list actual prices. $1.96 is $2.
When prices don't include tax I don't bother with the calculation so I don't even know how much it's going to cost. Then I try and spend all the stupid change people keep giving me and people are impatient that I didn't count it ahead of time. You know maybe I would if I had known what the price was going to be even a moment before I was being asked for it. In most cases if it wasn't out of necessity I wouldn't shop at any of these places.
Re: A Penny Saved: Psychological Pricing
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Me too. I know I'm in the minority with this, but I much prefer to do business (repeatedly) with a firm that isn't employing bullshit tactics. It would be interesting to see a study that reflects the whole cost-per-customer, since resorting to such pricing tricks means you're inevitably attracting consumers who are extremely price driven and who may be harder to upsell or retain.
There's a burrito chain in the northeast US called Boloco, and while their prices seem pretty arbitrary, all of the post tax prices are always whole dollar amounts. It's the only place I know of in Boston that does that.
As a Brit, I was amazed first time I went to the States with this idea of shops not putting the actual price you're going to pay on stuff.
I don't care how much money the shop is getting, as opposed to the state. All I want to know is how much money I'm going to be spending to get the thing, and I don't want to have to do calculations to work it out.
Re: A Penny Saved: Psychological Pricing
#39I love buying when prices are quoted in even amounts, especially if they include the tax. It makes me sad that we humans are so affected by tactics like this and that sellers (rationally) take advantage of them.
Outside the US, prices are more normal. I suspect that the tax issue in particular reflects the fact that taxes are different in every different city in the US, which makes tax-included prices hard to advertise.
Outside where? In most of Europe this is standard as well.
Re: A Penny Saved: Psychological Pricing
#40I always round prices up that end with .9x. On Kickstarter when prices are $79 I count them as $80. Saving me that minor calculation makes me more likely to buy something, it simply removes an annoyance. Is that really un-normal?
I also round them up, but in doing so, it makes me think about the fact that the price doesn't reflect the 'value' of the product: If they hadn't rounded it to ₤X.99, would it have been more or less? How much of that is profit?…