Josh Zumbrun
speaker
325 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2018
last heard Oct 2023
Josh Zumbrun’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
A lot of people have attributed it to the rise of the cash register.
You know, cash registers, which first became common in the late 1800s, were originally designed as a tactic to prevent employees from stealing from stores.
And so the idea there is that by setting something at 99 cents, whenever someone made a sale, it forced the cash register, the person working the cash register, to actually ring the sale up so that they could make a change.
Now, there's reason to question whether or not that story is true, though, because one of the professors I talked to who has studied this topic in great depth –
found that as early as 1880, Macy's was running newspaper advertisements where they're saying, you know, the best silks available for 99 cents.
Like, you can't beat this price.
Like, from the very beginning, it looks like retailers recognized the psychological trick and were using it that way from very early on.
There's evidence as early as 1880 that this was a tactic that retailers were using to get people to think they had the best prices.
Yeah, I mean, it's about attracting the consumer.
So, I mean, one of the things, you know, you'll see in advertisements is they'll kind of say, you know, oh, we got a TV for $399.99.
And you kind of think, wow, you know, TVs used to be a lot more than that.
And you don't necessarily think about the fact like, okay, what are the odds that the best price for this would actually happen to be $399.99, right?
Like someone can probably profitably sell you a TV for something less than that.
There's no reason that the best profitable price would be $3.99.
So when you stop to think about it, it actually makes sense that that wouldn't be a very good price on average.
But when it's blasted out to you in advertisements and stuff and you don't have anything to compare it to, it seems pretty good.
Oh, sure.
I mean, it's kind of the more nines, the more likely you are to see it.
You know, so the most common, if you're just looking at the last two digits, 99 cents is by far the most common price.
If you're looking at three digits, it's $9.99, you know, $19.99, $29.99.
Showing 181–200 of 325 · page 10 of 17
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