I believe it’s actually true however. Monkey brain not so good at math. One penny changes all three digits. Big penny.
Yeah, this is like saying "ads don't work on me". It fundamentally misunderstands pretty much everything about the topic.
this has always just felt like propaganda from marketing people to sustain their business of selling ads to companies lol, like no most ads don't fucking make me buy their stuff.
SOME ads make me buy their stuff, ads that are just "here's our product, our product is good for these reasons, also here's a cute cat".
But ads that make me cringe with force enough to crack my spine do not fucking inspire me to buy anything from the company, they make me go out of my way to never ever support the company if i can at all help it.
Learn the tricks to defend against them.
BIG PENNY
It's been proven, through many many studies. Even people aware of it are affected by it.
JCPenney tried changing all their prices ending with .99 to the round dollar amount. It was catastrophic for their sales, so they changed it back. It was a part of a larger plan by Ron Johnson (former senior VP of retail at Apple) to get rid of the "pricing game" of stores and to stop deceiving customers with fake sales/markdowns and deceptive pricing. It caused JCPenney's stock to halve and then some, and got him fired within 15 months. Here's an ad they showed that apologized to customers for using accurate & honest pricing instead of deceiving them, and begging them to come back
The power of the number "9" isn't confined to the cents column, either. One American clothing retailer experimented by changing the price of a dress from $34 to $39 dollars and increased sales by over 30%.
Consumers are fucking idiots. Humans are stupid dumb animals that like patterns too much for their own good and short circut their brain immediately after seeing minimal information to fill in the blanks. If you like patterns so much, why don't you marry them? Hmmm???
This is also why gas pumps measure gasoline to the thousandth of a gallon. Consumers LOVE to see those numbers racing upwards and think, "Whoaaaaa! Look at those numbers GO! I must be getting an awesome deal!"
It's a deliberate psychological trick, played on you by energy companies to fool you into thinking you're getting more than you really are.
This is indeed how we see prices.
A lot of research has gone into this and for better or worse it works so well that any price not set this way is not getting the best results for the seller.
As it turns out there hasn't been a lot of research into this. There was research on it that is the goto but I believe it references old catalog sales only(like sears) and not in store.
Edit: it may be more like people view products with a decimal price as cheap and products with whole numbers as quality.
Too many time I've seen people call something like 8.99 as 8 bucks instead of 9.
Oil companies - $2.99&9/10
Dammit.....I was going to make that joke, but you got here first! Welp. Guess I'm not original. We're all just Lemmings.......
looks at the name of this platform
DOUBLE DAMMIT!!!
Prices increased, but we calculated it really hard: $π
I have a lot of friends who would say that is 7 dollars.
Friends usually are people like you. 😉
Fools my little kids, every time.
$1,000+ tablet or phone. - "Fine..."
$0.99 app - "FUCK EVERYTHING ABOUT THAT!!!"
We have WILDLY different brains.
$600 phone - "GOD DAMMIT!!! WHY DID MY NOTE 4 FROM 2014 HAVE TO DIE??? I PAID $65 FOR THAT PHONE, AND IT WAS FUCKING GREAT!!!"
$0.00 app - "Why the hell does this calculator app need permission to access my contacts, the internet, and the ability to transfer data??? YOU'RE A GOD DAMN CALCULATOR APP!!! I'm not downloading that clear piece of spyware....."
This is an important point! Consumers have different price expectations depending on the context. A $20 video game might look cheap on console but be outrageously expensive for mobile.
What really gets me are real estate prices. "From the low sevens" means $749,000. That ain't low, my dudes.
35.99+free shipping Or 25.99+9.99 shipping
Always take the free shipping, even if prices are (mostly) the same. If you have to return something, you don't always get a refund on the shipping costs.
Ohh, free shipping. click
Also, if you get refund you don't typically get shipping refunded. Definitely worth that penny here.
What about these 9s? These are the highest numbers and that's the first thing that catches my attention.
I heard its so the cashier has to go into the til for change every transaction and cant pocket the money
And the register registers every sold item, so unless the cashier fakes the beep sound and the customer ignores the missing receipt, it won't work since the till would be short. And even if the cashier bypasses the register entirely, they could keep change outside the till if they want to pocket money.
Back in the day, the trick was when you owe the customer, say, 78 cents, you short them a quarter and only give them 53 cents. You still take that quarter out of the till, you just hold it with your pinkie so the cameras cant see it while you hand the rest of the change to the customer. If they notice they got shorted, you just say "oh sorry" and reopen the till to hand them the quarter thats still in your pinkie. But if they dont notice, you just made a quarter. This relies on you being able to memorise who youve shorted and not short the same person multiple times without a long time in between, because then people start to get sus
There’s still tax (in the US at least)
Where do cashiers give change as small as this?
I have only seen people round to the closest tenth
I do not want pennies. I've tried telling cashiers I don't want pennies. I always get the pennies.
I once asked a cashier about this; that person told me that the cashier is responsible for the till and that means trouble if they're under or over any amount, so they can't just not give you change.
At some places, they have little jars where the cashier can drop unwanted change, but at most places in the US, if you use cash you just have to accumulate essentially useless ballast.
What the price a tually is 8.07
