Automoderated users, Autopatrolled users, Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, Confirmed users, Moderators, Rollbackers, Administrators
213,951
edits
And 99 Cents: Difference between revisions
m
→Western Animation: formatting fix
m (Mass update links) |
m (→Western Animation: formatting fix) |
||
| (17 intermediate revisions by 7 users not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{trope}}
[[File:billy-mays-nineteen-ninety-five-dollar-
{{quote|"''Have you ever noticed how things cost...seven dollars and ninety-nine cents? Fourteen dollars ''and'' ninety-nine cents? ''Ninety-nine'' dollars ''and'' ninety-nine cents?''"
|'''Steve Rhoades''', ''[[Married... with Children]]''}}
When the screaming infomercial finally reaches the point of telling you the price you can be sure that price won't be a round number. Nothing will be sold for $10.00, $50.00 or $100.00. Every price will end with .95, .98 or .99.
▲{{quote|"''Have you ever noticed how things cost...seven dollars and ninety-nine cents? Fourteen dollars ''and'' ninety-nine cents? ''Ninety-nine'' dollars ''and'' ninety-nine cents?''"|'''Steve Rhoades''', ''[[Married With Children]]''}}
[[Truth in Television|This trope isn't restricted to TV commercials]]. Real world pricing follows this trend as well, and [[Grandfather Clause|has for a long time]]. Called "just-under pricing", this is [[Viewers are Morons|a psychological tactic to make an item seem cheaper than it actually is]]. Gas stations even go so far as to price gasoline in tenths of a cent. [
▲When the screaming infomercial finally reaches the point of telling you the price you can be sure that price won't be a round number. Nothing will be sold for $10.00, $50.00 or $100.00. Every price will end with .95, .98 or .99.
▲[[Truth in Television|This trope isn't restricted to TV commercials]]. Real world pricing follows this trend as well, and [[Grandfather Clause|has for a long time]]. Called "just-under pricing", this is [[Viewers are Morons|a psychological tactic to make an item seem cheaper than it actually is]]. Gas stations even go so far as to price gasoline in tenths of a cent. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing See also] [[The Other Wiki]].
Another possibility is that this method of pricing was originally designed to prevent cashiers from pocketing payments. A price ending with .99 almost guarantees that the cashier will need to open the register to get change, which then logs the sale in the register.
Line 21:
An oddball one is the Brands-Mart chain located mostly in Florida, where all of the prices end in 88 cents and have 88 in the price as well. When the tax is added, these prices usually come out even. Sometimes prices ending in 88 cents or a similar less than 90 number are used by the store to indicate that an item is discounted; this is common with electronics and games.
Some Goodwill thrift shops price things using a cents figure that is a repetition of the dollars figure; for instance, $13.13. This prevents customers from altering the prices by erasing the
The gimmick also lends itself well to advertising trickery, as someone can claim their item is available for "under $30!" Well, yes, technically speaking, $29.99 ''is'' less than $30...
There's also the possibility that people will be fooled into thinking that "$29.99" represents an exact price while "$30" represents an approximation. Odds are, unless this is a jurisdiction with no sales tax (or with value added tax – "VAT content" – already included in the price, European-style), the final price is going to be well over $30 after taxes. Add the endless outstretched palms seeking gratuities in certain fields (tourism, restaurants, taxis...) and the costs go higher still.
In Australia, because the lowest coin used is 5c, prices are normally And Ninety Five Cents instead, but you can sometimes see .97, .98 and .99 on prices. Figure out how Aussies pay for $1.99 with only 2$ or 1$ coins.<ref>The majority of Aussie retailers have POS registers that automatically round prices to the nearest 5 cents, regardless of what number they end in. EB Games, for example uses the Swedish Rounding System.</ref>▼
▲In Australia, because the lowest coin used is 5c, prices are normally And Ninety Five Cents instead, but you can sometimes see .97, .98 and .99 on prices.
* However, if paying via EFTPOS or credit card, the amount is not rounded.
There's also a quirk (at least in Ontario, Canada's sales tax regulations) where prepared meals priced $4 or higher are hit with a 13% value added tax, but the $3.99 special (which buys increasingly little these days) is taxed at a lower rate. The provincial government has tried to revoke this tiny tax break a couple of times, only to meet strong pushback from fast food restaurateurs.
This thinking is often carried over to large-ticket items, like cars, at least in the US -- nobody cares about a few cents when they're buying a car, but the MSRP (Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price) in dollars will end in 7 or 5 far more often than it will end in 0. ▼
▲This thinking is often carried over to large-ticket items, like cars, at least in the
{{examples}}
== Film ==
* ''[[Back to
* In ''[[Clerks]]'', Dante remarks that all prices end in 0.99.
** And yet in the background, all the prices end with the number five.
* Present right in the title of the animated film ''[[$9.99]]''.
== Literature ==
* ''[[Matilda]]'' had Harry Wormwood (the father) advising his son to "Never sell a car for a round number. Always go under by 50 pence. It may not look like much, but it makes the prices look a lot cheaper."
== [[Live
* ''[[Look Around You]]'' shows a machine with a price tag of £999.99½p.
* ''[[Married...
* An episode of ''The Antiques Roadshow'' featured an old Sindy doll from the 1960s. The original price was so-many shillings and 11 pence. There was 12 old pence in a shilling, making this the pre-decimal version of the trope.
** Further to this, there were twenty shillings in a pound, so something costing more than £1 would typically be priced at x pounds 19/11d - i.e. one (old) penny below the round number.
Line 50 ⟶ 54:
== Music ==
* The song "Lord, Mr. Ford" by Jerry Reed contains the following lines:
{{quote|
== [[Web Animation]] ==
Line 56 ⟶ 60:
== [[Web Original]] ==
* ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!: The
== [[Western Animation]] ==
Line 62 ⟶ 66:
** To be fair to the Prof, he did identify that it was the same number.
* One episode of ''[[The Simpsons]]'' featured Ned Flanders on the run from some [[Teens Are Monsters|punk teenagers]]. He calls for help from a gas station, but doesn't know the station's name. The only clue he can give in helping someone find him is that [[GPS Evidence|the price of gas is $1.49 and eight tenths of a cent]].
{{quote|
'''Marge:''' Donny's Discount Gas! }}
* ''[[
** "Amuse your friends! Confuse your enemies! '''Annoy total strangers!'''"
** "It's absolutely nothing!"
** {{spoiler|bucket not included}}
** More generally "NINETY-NINE NINETY-NINE
* A non-financial example appears in ''[[Garfield and Friends]]'', where Wade, after [[Mattress Tag Gag|ripping the a tag off the bottom of a couch and learning that it's against the law]], imagines himself being sentenced to "9,999 years in prison". Wade is relieved: "At least I didn't get life."
=== Asia ===▼
▲== Asia ==
* In Japan, most prices end with 80. As in, it's not 1,000 yen, it's 980. This is probably because the number 8 is considered lucky in Japanese culture, while 9 and [[Four Is Death|4]] are considered unlucky. The reason it's not 88 yen is that 1 yen coins seem to be considered an inconvenient hassle, and many vending machines won't even accept them.
* Taiwan also has many prices ending in 8, and the occasional 80 or even 88, also most likely because 8 is lucky in Taiwan as well.
Line 80 ⟶ 83:
* Relatively uncommon, but far from unheard of in Israel. The local equivalent of a one cent coin has long ago been phased out, followed by the 5 cent, partly because such a low value coin is considered more of a hassle then anything else, and partly because those coins cost more to stamp then their actual value. Instead, non flat values are simply rounded to the nearest tenth of a Shekel.
=== Oceania ===
* The lowest denomination of currency in Australia is 5 cents, ever since the 1 and 2 cent coins were abolished in the 90s. You'd think this would stop places from advertising
** EB Games in Australia actually uses the various prices to sort how items are discounted during sales. If it ends with, for example, 84, then it'll be 25% off.
** An [https://web.archive.org/web/20130507113853/http://www.money-au.com.au/news/Credit-Cards/Consumers-buy-into-99-pricing-says-study-_18698717.php experiment] conducted at an Australian restaurant suggests that this pricing trick may actually be effective. After the price of a particular menu item was reduced by a single cent (all prices started at round X.00 figures) customers became 15% more likely to order said item. When everything else was reduced to X.99 to match, the distribution of orders returned to roughly the same as before.
* In New Zealand since 2006, the smallest coin has been the 10 cent. Prices ending in .90 are the most common, but there still are .97, .98 and .99 prices out there.
** It is rare to see a price ending in .95 - there is no fixed rule on whether to round up to .00 or down to .90, although most retailers round down.
** Rounding only takes place on the total amount at the end, and only if you are one of the few people still paying with cash - three-quarters of face-to-face transactions in New Zealand are settled by EFTPOS (debit card), which as you can pay to the nearest cent, does not need rounding.
=== Europe ===
* Some Euro countries have this subverted, by rounding the price to the nearest 5 cents from the result. Thankfully.
** That's both because of tradition and because the 1c and 2c coins are tiny inconvenient little ''shits'', in fact the Netherlands have taken them out of circulation because of this.
*** Finland never put them in circulation at all because of this.
*** They are still acceptable money, tough.
* In Denmark the smallest coin is 50 øre yet most prices still end in .95 or similar. The prices are usually added first and then rounded off in the end, so that the small parts may add up. The shop "Søstrene Grenes" has wacky prices such as 13.77 or 6.42 as a trademark. Amazingly enough they do not use barcodes but keep a staff that is incredibly fast in typing in the prices manually.
* In Norway the smallest coin is the 50 øre. Prices often end on .90, and for cash purchases prices are rounded to the nearest whole or half krone.
* Exception: the British music/video/games retailer Zavvi now prices most of its goods in pounds flat.
** Also, ''another'' British music/video/games retailer, Fopp, used to deal in flat prices and adopted the practice before any of the other franchises did. Unfortunately, due to bankrupting and being bought by HMV, only 8 Fopp stores still exist. Zavvi has also gone into administration selling off a handful of stores to HMV.
** With the temporary reduction of VAT to 15%, this has become
** As a point of interest, in PC World a price ending in .97 means that the item has been discontinued and is being sold at a clearance price, making it ineligible for further reductions such as staff discount.
** The joke political party the Official Monster Raving Loony Party actually have the introduction of a 99p coin in their manifesto, to do away with fiddly pennies in change.
Line 116 ⟶ 119:
* Averted on American military installations in Europe. Due to the high cost of shipping coins overseas, pennies are not imported. Prices are rounded to the nearest nickel at the register.
=== North America ===
* At least one chain of stores in Pennsylvania ends all prices in wacky numbers like .
* Wal-Mart corporate policy states that stores cannot set their prices to end in 9, 5, or 0, partially because of this trope.
** Wal-Mart, at least in Canada, also uses the "change the cents to indicate a sale": There's actually a particular number that indicates "this product will not be rolled back any more".
*** They also change the cent ending to note that an item is not eligible for a storewide sale. Usually it's .97.
Line 126 ⟶ 129:
** The iTunes Store (if you use the iTunes cards) and Xbox Live Marketplace have the same problem (say I have 190 Microsoft Points left over, and the DLC I want is 1,200 MSP. Normally, I would buy the 1,000 MSP, but I'd have 10 MSP under the limit. The smallest bundle of MSP available is the 500 points one. That would leave me with 490 MSP left over, and the cycle begins again).
*** The iTunes Store charges everything ending in either $.90 or 9. One track typically cost $.99, though now it can be $.89 or $1.09. An album might cost $9.90. And a whole 75-track iTunes Essentials set costs exactly $74.25.
* For the record, the sales tax rates in the United States can be found [
* Mexico has an interesting play on this. The smallest legal coin is the 10 cents coin, and thus, in theory, prices are rounded to the nearest multiple of 10 cents... but, most convenience stores and supermarkets run a price rounding program, where they round up the final price to the next peso if your ticket has at least 50 cents, then they account for all the multi-million cents they snagged in the massive round-up, stash then in a bank account, donate them to charity, and at the same time they get free tax breaks!
* 99 Cents Only stores in Southern California and a few other places run on this trope. Every price(before tax) will end in a 9 and the most expensive items they sell will cost $99.99. The company also celebrates the 99th birthday of public figures and names 99 year old individuals as honorary spokespersons. Lastly, they say they're open 9 days a week, one store held a wedding on 09/09/2009 costing 99 cents, and their trucks say that, instead of no cash, the driver only has 99 cents.
* Doubly Subverted in Century Theatres. Concessions sell snacks that usually only have a multiple of 25 cents (and most people have a few extra quarters in their pockets). These prices however, already calculate sales tax. The real cost of a large popcorn isn't $6.50, but around $5.96 with 9% tax.
** The real cost is $6.50 because
* 99 cent stores love this trope, of course. In fact, there's a common joke that goes "My family was really rich. We went to the dollar store."
** However, some dollar stores have mostly flat-dollar prices. When every item isn't a single dollar, that is.
Line 137 ⟶ 140:
* Political example: The 9-9-9 tax plan proposed by Herman Cain.
** Bunk now he's gone, 2012 primaries.
* The phasing out of the one-cent coin in 2012 in [[Canada]] hasn't stopped the use of this trope there, thanks to the prevalence of paying with credit cards and debit cards.
=== South America ===
* Brazil has fairly random pricing for things, with the exception of certain specific cheap-goods stores. Most people would leave without claiming the 1 centavo coin they're entitled to in order to avoid being branded as [[The Scrooge]]. An alternative would be paying with a debit card.
* In Chile in any supermarket or store, every product will end with 9. For example a chocolate bar might cost 799 Pesos. Sometimes is common to see with 49 with smaller products. And with more expensive products wil be with 990. This is mostly for taxes. But that also brought the problem with the "1 peso" Coin, in supermarkets they insist if you will donate that peso or more to charity just to round up your change. And the fact that no one can buy anything with "1 peso" coins anywhere. In most places they reject those coins saying that those have any value at all.
Line 148 ⟶ 152:
[[Category:Advertising Tropes]]
[[Category:Truth in Television]]
[[Category:
| |||