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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
bydevslash0 ( 4203435 ) writes:
Make deceiving marketing prices ending in .99 illegal and the problem will go away.
bymisnohmer ( 1636461 ) writes:
That would work, as long as making all prices in even dollars (always ending with .00) is mandatory and accompanied with sales taxes in multiples of 5%. Or, we can just get rid of all sales taxes, or make all sales taxes a multiple of 100%, and then set prices in multiples of $0.05.
byRegistered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) writes:
That would work, as long as making all prices in even dollars (always ending with .00) is mandatory and accompanied with sales taxes in multiples of 5%. Or, we can just get rid of all sales taxes, or make all sales taxes a multiple of 100%, and then set prices in multiples of $0.05.
That would just complicate things and likely lead to higher prices as now any process change would be in multiples of a dollar, and no items could be less than a dollar; I suspect you really meant in even 5 cent intervals. As for sales tax, it would result in increases since many are not multiples of 5, especially when local option taxes of a penny or two are added to a base rate.
However, that is adding complications to what is a simple solution - round sales ending with1,2 ,6,7 cents down, 3,4,8,9. up If you make 10 buys a day for a year, and always get the worse round up (i.e. 8 costing 2 cents), that $7.30 in a year; if it always goes in your favor you're up that amount. I suspect in practice the variance in results would result in a negligible gain to loss; there's probably more loose change in a sofa than the amount from rounding. As for stores, I suspect the shear volume of transactions makes the outcome a rounding error, and what is purchased varies enough that you can't come up with a pricing strategy that ensures you come out ahead.
A customer could always buy items separately to end in 6 or 7 to make 2 cents each time, but the marginal effort to do that would outweigh any marginal benefit.
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