Poll of the Day > Can we as a society stop it with the whole 99 cents thing.

(+) Yeah! (+)

You're not fooling anyone, it's a fucking dollar. Just say it's $5, way quicker to write than $4.99.

its all a racket by big pennies

"I will give you a million dollars" is a charitable gesture
"I will give you a million dollars in pennies" is a threat

Zareth posted...

You're not fooling anyone, it's a fucking dollar. Just say it's $5, way quicker to write than $4.99.

While you'd think that was the case, the psychology says otherwise.

The better question is why do gas prices end with 9/10. The same logic probably applied when gas was priced in cents but it seems kind of pointless now

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/3/3e552b2d.jpg

The trick still works that's the problem

JC Penney tried that once. They marked all their prices down at least 40% and stopped using odd pricing (i.e., something that would originally have been $99.99 would instead be priced at no more than $60).

It failed spectacularly. The CEO that implemented the plan eventually had his salary cut by 96% before being fired a little while later. JC Penney then ran a commercial apologizing for, I guess, not fooling their customer base, and basically begging them to come back.

Zareth posted...

You're not fooling anyone

Yeah, that's absolutely not true.

rjsilverthorn posted...

While you'd think that was the case, the psychology says otherwise.

Indeed. Even if you've consciously acknowledged the trick, your first impression of the number will still be that it's smaller than it actually is. You pretty much have to actively stop yourself from thinking it's lower at all times to avoid being influenced by it, and the simple fact of the matter is that nobody can maintain that all the time.

I do, however, make a habit of preferentially supporting businesses that do price things honestly.

dainkinkaide posted...

JC Penney tried that once. They marked all their prices down at least 40% and stopped using odd pricing (i.e., something that would originally have been $99.99 would instead be priced at no more than $60).

Pretty sure that's why it failed spectacularly, not because they dropped $0.99 markings

Games Workshop doesn't use .99 markings anymore, which is odd because they're one company that would definitely want their products to seem cheaper than they actually are lol

I've been asking about that since last century. It's so inconvenient.

As someone who works in retail 99% of customers say it's x dollars rounded down instead of up one penny.

Zareth posted...

You're not fooling anyone, it's a fucking dollar. Just say it's $5, way quicker to write than $4.99.

Science has repeatedly shown that you are literally fooling everyone.

Even if only subconsciously, your brain absolutely processes $4.99 as a significantly better value than $5. The first number you read helps prime your perception.

There've been a lot of studies done on this. Which why it's so prevalent.



BoomerKuwanger posted...

There just shouldn't be pennies at all, some other countries have figured this out but America as usual is like eh whatever

The problem is you need to round off, and no one on either side of the deal wants to be the person who "loses" from the rounding I don't want to pay a few cents more on every single transaction, businesses don't want to lose a few cents on every transaction, and it's the government that's forced to eat the cost on making pennies so no one cares (even if, ultimately, our taxes are paying for it). Americans are probably one of the most economically/consumer-obsessed cultures on Earth, it's not a shock that we'd be the most resistant to that sort of change.

In theory digital commerce completely obviates the problem, but as long as people still want physical currency you'll always have the problem.

Sadly this bullshit has probably rotted our brains to the point that seeing $5 makes you think it's actually 6 bucks

Zareth posted...

Sadly this bullshit has probably rotted our brains to the point that seeing $5 makes you think it's actually 6 bucks

No, nobody does that.

Zareth posted...

Sadly this bullshit has probably rotted our brains to the point that seeing $5 makes you think it's actually 6 bucks

So instead of admitting you're wrong you just try to exaggerate the opposite direction for no reason?

What

Can we as a society stop it with the whole underwear thing

You're either wearing clothes or you're not, anything further is just hotdogging

Blightzkrieg posted...

Can we as a society stop it with the whole underwear thing

You're either wearing clothes or you're not, anything further is just hotdogging

He. Don't. Miss.

#whatwouldblighdo

Blightzkrieg posted...

Can we as a society stop it with the whole underwear thing

You're either wearing clothes or you're not, anything further is just hotdogging

I don't know about you, but my wedding tackle needs extra layers just to hold the monster down. No one wants him rampaging across the countryside.

Zareth posted...

Games Workshop doesn't use .99 markings anymore, which is odd because they're one company that would definitely want their products to seem cheaper than they actually are lol

Honestly, anyone who has the money and the lack of sense to buy GW models in an era where 3D printers exist probably isn't even looking at the price tag, so GW could put "your kidney" on there for all the difference it would make.

I'll pay the extra to not have to work with resin or file off a million attachment points, thank you

I've never been able to get the support points on 3D prints not look like shit.

The really dumb thing is when you have $14.99 and then have to pay like 7% sales tax on top of that.

Blightzkrieg posted...

Can we as a society stop it with the whole underwear thing

You're either wearing clothes or you're not, anything further is just hotdogging

I'm not wearing any pants!
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/e/e9d369cb.jpg

Blightzkrieg posted...

I've never been able to get the support points on 3D prints not look like shit.

Zareth posted...

I'll pay the extra to not have to work with resin or file off a million attachment points, thank you

If your supports are leaving a bunch of marks that aren't easy to clean up, it's a sign your print settings are off. If set properly, your supports should generally come off with a little gentle pressure and not leave any notable marks behind on the model. Usually hard-to-remove supports that leave scars on the model are a sign that you're over-curing it and need to turn down your cure time (I had that issue when I upgraded printers and couldn't figure out why all my prints were looking like shit).

I need substantially *less* time to clean up a 3D print compared to one of GW's plastic models, where I have to file off flash lines and sprue marks and where there's generally more assembly involved.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The problem is you need to round off, and no one on either side of the deal wants to be the person who "loses" from the rounding

For the sake of quantifying it, I just took my 2019 books (I kinda fell off the bookkeeping wagon, that's my most recent file) and rounded every single transaction to the nearest nickel to represent what would have happened if all of those transactions had been cash (they're taken directly from my bank/credit statements, so aside from a couple instances of withdrawing/depositing cash, they were all electronic). In that year, I spent just shy of $51,000 dollars. If every single one of those transactions had hypothetically been made in cash and therefore rounded to the nearest nickel, the total difference would have been...

Drumroll please...

A loss of 50 cents for me. An increase of less than 0.001% in what I spent that year. I simply cannot abide such a crippling loss.

If the policy were instead to always round up (rare) or always round down (more common)? Rounding up would cost me an extra $6.50 for the year, rounding down would save me $6.75. Both extremes come in at 0.013% of that $51k, and in the latter case, businesses actually probably don't lose out by rounding down because they're generally already saving considerably more than the maximum loss of 4 cents per transaction by not having to pay debit/credit fees (and, in fact, many businesses offer discounts for people paying in cash for that exact reason).

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Americans are probably one of the most economically/consumer-obsessed cultures on Earth, it's not a shock that we'd be the most resistant to that sort of change.

And that obsession is idiotically blind to the reality of the numbers involved in this matter. Accepting "it's just the culture" instead of pointing out just how utterly trivial the difference is (even before considering the fact that actually using pennies requires enough extra labour to negate those few cents of savings) makes no sense and perpetuates a substantial amount of wasted government money. Resisting the abolition of the penny is stupid and should be called out as such every time somebody says "it adds up" and thinks that's the end of the thought that can be put into it. It adds up to a fart in the wind, and inflation means it's only getting windier.

Big retail is starting to train its shoppers that if it ends in 97 cents its a really good deal and you should buy it. So if you really want to sell something use that instead.

If I had my own retail chain all prices would end in .69

slacker03150 posted...

Big retail is starting to train its shoppers that if it ends in 97 cents its a really good deal and you should buy it. So if you really want to sell something use that instead.

The Sears strategy where the cents denotes which sale it is. I really hated that. I left a lot of stuff in my cart when they did that. Put say 5 different shirts on a rack, a sign saying 40% off. But you find out at the cash register only items ending in 87 cents is on sale.

adjl posted...

And that obsession is idiotically blind to the reality of the numbers involved in this matter.

Oh, I don't disagree with you.

But the problem is, in life, what's actually true rarely matters when compared to what people perceive as true. Which is part of why emotional arguments are almost always more effective than rational ones.

Humans are feeling creatures who actually figured out how to think, but we don't do all that well with the thinking a lot of the time.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Oh, I don't disagree with you.

But the problem is, in life, what's actually true rarely matters when compared to what people perceive as true. Which is part of why emotional arguments are almost always more effective than rational ones.

Humans are feeling creatures who actually figured out how to think, but we don't do all that well with the thinking a lot of the time.

This is a very easy emotional argument to shoot down, though. Most people will leave it at "it adds up" even if they agree with abolishing the penny because they haven't done any concrete work to prove what they believe to be intuitively true. I have, and the conclusion is that in the absolute worst case scenario of me doing every single transaction in cash and the policy being to round up in every case, that would end up costing me an extra ten thousandth of what I spent across ~400 transactions in a year (or about 12.5 minutes of work, assuming 52, 40-hour weeks). And that worst case scenario is all but impossible (as far as I know, everyone that's abolished the penny either rounds normally or rounds down in every case), with slightly more realistic hypotheticals either being an order of magnitude more trivial, or being trivially beneficial to consumers and notably beneficial to businesses because it encourages cash payments.

Sure, people will still stuff their fingers in their ears and act like their opinions matter even when indisputable math proves that they don't, but there's no reason to tolerate that when the math is this straightforward. Those rounded pennies simply don't add up, so if somebody tries to insist that they do, don't accept that.

Out of curiosity, I just did the same exercise for normal rounding to the nearest dime or quarter to simulate abolishing the nickel and dime, respectively. That gave a total annual loss of $1.20 for abolishing nickels and $2.45 for abolishing dimes, for a respective 0.0024% and 0.0048% of my total expenditures (assuming 100% cash transactions). I think there's a legitimate case to be made for getting rid of all small change, though in that case it would pretty much have to be normal rounding because the automatic round down option would probably exceed what businesses save with cash transactions (especially businesses selling a lot of <$5 items). There might even be a case for ditching cents entirely (a gain of $8.30 or 0.0163% for me), but I think that's probably too far because businesses that deal in smaller transactions rely on more granularity than that in pricing their stuff, plus on smaller transactions that rounding could wipe out sales tax entirely.

I see $4.99 and think "that's gotta be like $5.50 after tax"

Will tax-free places give you a penny if you buy a 4.99 item or is it understood that that's bullshit

Zareth posted...

Will tax-free places give you a penny if you buy a 4.99 item or is it understood that that's bullshit

From what I can remember, they give you the penny back if the price is set that way That said, they sometimes set the price differently

Before Canada got rid of them, I've been given a single penny as change before, in cases where the after-tax cost came out to a value that would have lined up with an amount of cash I had if not for the 99 cent thing (like a $60 game coming to $69 after tax, except it's actually $68.99).

Zareth posted...

Will tax-free places give you a penny if you buy a 4.99 item or is it understood that that's bullshit

Are you asking if places give you change if you give them more money than the total of your bill? Yes they do.

BoomerKuwanger posted...

I did some math based on some figures I googled and Walmart would get an extra ~$170 million a year if they gained just a penny from each transaction being rounded up in the US. That number is already so unfathomable to me I thought fuck that, then I googled some more and apparently they get 600 billion in revenue a year, so that really is pocket change to them. Good lord.

This shit should be round down for that reason though, I know it isn't going to affect my wallet much, but these corporations don't need anything more

Remember that every transaction being rounded up by a penny isn't overly realistic. For starters, that requires every transaction to be in cash, and while there are a few holdouts who insist on using cash as often as possible who will bear close to the maximum brunt of whatever personal loss rounding can create, cash transactions are always going to be a minority on the broader scale. Beyond that, with normal rounding, the difference is going to range from -2 to +2 cents, with a small bias toward retailers making more because of the prevalence of $X.99 prices (I don't have any concrete data for this, but intuitively, I believe it's more common to see people buy 1-2 things at a time than to buy 3-4 without it being a larger trip. I could be mistaken and I welcome correction), and that means it'll mostly even out. For those that care enough to min/max it, there's also the option of paying cash for cases where it rounds down and using credit/debit for cases where it would round up since the consumer has the power to make that decision. All of this adds up to substantially reduce the retailer's gain below the hypothetical maximum.

That said, I do like the round down approach. Not only does it always work in the consumer's favour (indirectly benefiting customer service staff that consequently don't have to deal with Karens that don't understand how rounding works freaking out over a nickel), businesses generally won't even feel the loss because it's absorbed by the benefits of cash transactions. Not having to pay the 3-4% credit cards often charge is a much bigger deal than losing 2 cents per transaction, so making cash purchases more attractive by giving them an inherent "discount" works out in their favour (to the point that many businesses already give discounts for using cash). Bonus points where it's mostly smaller businesses that benefit from that where the Walmarts of the world have been able to negotiate lower credit card fees with their larger market shares.

Absolutely not. It might not fool you consciously but it does subconsciously no matter how much you think you are above it. So I'll keep listing things with 99 at the end.

BoomerKuwanger posted...

I thought some countries rounded to 5 or 0 whether or not it was cash, but it's been like 15 years since I've traveled to another country that wasn't Canada, so I might just be remembering wrong. In Canada's case though yeah it's not that big a deal if card transactions still go to individual cents

Canada doesn't round for non-cash transactions (which is why I can do this exercise with my bank/credit statements), but admittedly I'm also not sure if other countries do. The only one I know for sure is that Australia automatically rounds down in every case, but I couldn't tell you if that's only for cash transactions or not. It's only really necessary for cash transactions, but it wouldn't be surprising if it were applied to other retail transactions for consistency's sake.

I mean we're at a point that dollar might as well be the lowest amount.

Selling for 1.50? Why not double the package, change $3, and save the planet by cutting your packing nearly in half. The shrinkflation is the opposite we should be doing. Right now they are just filling the packaging half way to trick you into thinking it's the same amount.

SinisterSlay posted...

I mean we're at a point that dollar might as well be the lowest amount.

Selling for 1.50? Why not double the package, change $3, and save the planet by cutting your packing nearly in half. The shrinkflation is the opposite we should be doing. Right now they are just filling the packaging half way to trick you into thinking it's the same amount.

I mean, they could But Id rather have the smaller packages for when I want to spend less, or dont need as much Or have a certain amount to spend and want multiple things Many reasons for the smaller packages

SinisterSlay posted...

I mean we're at a point that dollar might as well be the lowest amount.

Selling for 1.50? Why not double the package, change $3, and save the planet by cutting your packing nearly in half. The shrinkflation is the opposite we should be doing. Right now they are just filling the packaging half way to trick you into thinking it's the same amount.

Nah, a dollar goes too far. Pricing an item at $2.50 instead of $2 or $3 is a meaningful choice. It might not affect consumers all that much (see: my calculation that rounding normally would reduce my expenses by ~0.016%), but for retailers selling hundreds or thousands of those items 20% more/less is a very big deal (more than the entire profit margin, in many cases). It also messes with sales tax, since any base price close to an even dollar would very often get rounded back down to that dollar and wipe out the tax on cheaper items.

I've seen same sell tags change by 5 cents mid sale because who knows why

SinisterSlay posted...

I mean we're at a point that dollar might as well be the lowest amount.

Nope. I'd suggest a nickel.

Zareth posted...

Nope. I'd suggest a nickel.

I guess but nothing is that price anymore.

At this point being under $100 is a sale.

Want a turkey? I took this yesterday.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/3/357d065c.jpg

To be fair, a Butterball is the Cadillac of turkeys