Its literally how we see prices which is why companies do this
It's the three strategies of pricing:
- Price the item as XX.99 to make it feel cheaper than it is
- Price the item as a whole/round number to make it feel premium
- Price the item as a seemingly random number like XX.57 to get ahead of the shopper who are weary of the first two tactics
The amount of times I've watched Youtubers say something like "35 dollars" while showing an image that shows the price as $35.96 happens too often for me to side with OP lol, sorry.
I generally round up to nearest bigger number or close to that. $19.99 is $20. $23.99 would probably be $25. $180 would just be $200.
No real rhyme or reason, just the bigger the number the more I fudge the “real” price upwards thanks to sales tax and a “can I really afford this?” factor.
I'm not sure it works on me. Not because I'm some super human resistant to advertising (I'm not) but because I'm so bad at math that when they start asking me about anything involving small change I tune out and overestimate by 50% rounded into nice whole numbers.
"This is 19.99"
"Okay so it's basically 30$."
It gives me nice surprises sometimes when I get my receipt.
I just wished it was mandated to list prices to include all the taxes along with it. Whether it says $19.99 or $20 still isn't the actual price.
Recently had the worst of this. Was craving chocolate milk, find a nice size bottle of it for $3. Get to register. $6.63 total price because the glass bottle had over a $3 deposit.
People suck at math and this is how they confuse people into not caring what the actual price becomes when they have to add multiple items together.
What’s 19.99 + 21.75 + 4.99 + 3.99 + 1.99? Can the common person do that math in their head while grocery shopping? What about adding the tax to that total? Not a chance.
Most people probably don’t even know what the sales tax is in their own state.
This is one of those things that makes me feel the slightest bit more agitated and cynical towards people and society. We all know it's manipulative, and that should be enough reason not to do it. So why does everyone who runs a business do it? Like yeah it does work, but is it really worth subtly eroding your own customer's trust in you? There's an invisible cost of goodwill here.
Also "
200100" is very different from "100".Everyone here is hilarious thinking they're immune to it.
Because it is how we see prices. It takes a bit of effort to see it as 20.
Living in Canada, this shit never worked for me.
Our laws require that pretty much everything is taxed, some more than others, but taxed nonetheless. Despite this, our laws also allow for the tax to be excluded from the price listed for an item, so tax has always been an unpleasant surprise during checkout for me.
I'm sure many other Canadians can echo my sentiment.
The fact is, I'm always expecting to pay between 10 and 15% more on pretty much everything when I get to the checkout, so I tend to do math in my head to figure it out. Let's just say that when I see $4.99, it's easier for my brain to figure out 10 (or 13%, or 15%) of $5 than it is to figure out the tax on $4.99, so I err higher rather than lower on everything.
I see $4.99, I think $5 +tax and I figure that will set me back somewhere between $5.50 and $6 at checkout. Doing the math, the current HST tax in Ontario where I am, IIRC is 13%. 13% of $4.99 is $0.6487 (the company will round up to the nearest penny, so 65 cents), which is $5.64. going from $5 at 15% (which is what I'll do in my head for simplicity), I'd estimate it's $5.75 at checkout, and get pleasantly surprised when I save 11 cents because the tax was less than I anticipated.
All of this shit is kind of moot IMO, since I think people aren't looking at prices nearly as much as they used to. When I was young, debit cards didn't exist, credit cards were a tedious process of filing out paperwork, and so most of the time people carried cash. It was common for people to add up their costs as they went to ensure that the cash they brought would cover the items they're buying at the grocery. For smaller transactions like convenience stores, you'd just do it in your head, and for big ticket purchases, like appliances, furniture, vehicles, etc, you'd use cheques or credit cards because the hassle of doing that was outweighed by the liability of carrying thousands of dollars to the store to buy a thing.
With debit/interac/whatever, and the chip/sign, or chip/pin process (and/or "tap" to pay), you have convenient, and instant access to your entire life savings on a whim with near zero effort or inconvenience. It's never been so easy to spend money (especially money you don't have - eg overdraft or credit cards).
When I started to do my own grocery shopping, sometime after debit/interac/chip&pin was made to be commonplace, I rarely looked at prices. I assumed the price was reasonable for what I was buying, and concerning myself with the nickels and dimes of it all was more effort than I cared to put into buying something I wanted or needed.
With the prices of everything going haywire in the last 5 years or so, I find myself looking at prices a lot more and going for alternatives to my "usual" brands of products simply due to price alone, especially when grocery shopping. If I can kick my grocery bill from $300 to $250 by simply buying smarter, that's a cheap date I get to go on with my spouse that I otherwise couldn't afford. That's more valuable to me than buying name brand cereal or cans of Campbell's soup over the store brand.
IMO, I'm the problem.... or rather, my previous mentality was the problem that in part led to the crazy increase in pricing. I didn't concern myself if something was a cheaper option and just bought whatever I wanted or whatever I was used to buying. I don't have brand loyalty beyond "this was good/worked in the past, so I'll buy it again". That amount of "loyalty" doesn't extend to significant increases in the price of things. The prices went up and while my grocery bill went up, I didn't pay much attention to it. That's just what it cost me. The cost always changed because I wouldn't always buy the same things, nor the same quantity of things. So I expected it to be fairly random. That created a false loyalty to products that just kept going up in price. I kept paying that because I wasn't paying attention. So they kept going up because the company didn't see a drop in sales because of the increase in price.
Now, I'm much more conscious of what I'm buying. I'll compare not only the cost, but the quantity of a thing. If I can get 700g of something at $5 but an alternative has 1000g for $6. I'll get the $6 item, since I'm paying more, for a lot more, therefore I'm paying less per gram. I've become the kind of shopper that most companies can't keep. If prices go up, I'll jump to another brand that's cheaper. If the quantity goes down (shrinkflation) I'll go to a brand that gives me better value for my dollar.
I'm one step away from cutting coupons here. I'll do it too.
At the end of the day, it's all about economics for me. If it's going to take me more time to compare, or find coupons, or whatever than I'm saving by doing that, then I won't do it. Right now, cutting coupons falls below that value line. I put my time ahead of the proposed savings by cutting coupons. My time saved by not doing it, is simply more valuable to me right now. If/when that changes, I'll start doing it.
Fuck corporations.
"Keep the change"
It is how it is, Americans are the dumbest
It doesn't take much to convince the people in charge they're right. Usually the amount is minimum wage.
Honestly, however much I want to pretend to be better than that, I think it does work on me. Obviously not on a conscious level, I know how numbers work, but some part of my monkey brain sees the 1 instead of the 2 and therefore concludes that it must be way cheaper. It's a feeling that no amount of facts is going to disable. And in the end many purchasing decisions aren't based on a full analysis but on feelings.
This is called: Left Digit Bias
They may list it as $19.99 but I'm always going to call it twenty bucks and eleven cents.
I doubt it works on me. I have bought smaller items due to doing the per unit price in my head (don't trust what they put there and two often then apples and organges the units) or completely not bought something or bought some alternative (potatoes instead of bread or rice instead of potatoes).
Doesn't it have its roots in forcing clerks to give change and recording the sale (rather than pocketing the money)?
But its true though, don't you think they would save on the printer ink if it wasn't the case?
