Funny business on the price tag

Have you ever wondered about those strange prices that dominate the retail world? It's not £5, it's £4.99. Forget £10, it is bound to be £9.99. Just occasionally a retailer will rebel. For a brief bizarre period around 10 years ago Asda experimented with pricing CDs and the like with prices that ended with numbers like .74 or .27 - it looked much stranger than you might expect, so engrained is the notion that .99 is what nature intended.

I think there is little doubt that the reason that retailers do this is psychological. We aren't hugely rational when it comes to decisions, especially when they involve those alien things numbers, which didn't exist as concepts when our current brain structure first evolved. So it doesn't matter how much you consciously tell yourself that £10 is pretty much the same as £9.99, your unconscious, shopping-powering mind will see it as considerably less. And it helps if you have to describe your purchase to a penny-pinching other half. 'It was only £9,' you can say, simply not specifying your rounding rule (and who would).

Interestingly, though, a book I'm currently reading for review suggests that the practice of using these trailing .99s predates the awareness of such psychological factors. According to The Universal Machine by Ian Watson, this practice originated with the first cash registers. These were designed to prevent the salespeople ripping off shop owners by clearly registering a transaction and by ringing a bell so the supervisor could see the assistant drop the money into the till.

Apparently the theory was that if you had something priced at £5 then you could be handed a £5 note which you slipped into your pocket and as far as the shop was concerned, the item had been stolen by a shoplifter, while you were £5 better off. But if the item was priced at £4.99 you would almost inevitably have to give change, making it necessary to 'ring up' the item and be under your supervisors scrutiny.

So there you go £4.99? It's surprising how much you get for it.

(The full review of The Universal Machine will be posted on www.popularscience.co.uk in a few days time.)

Image from Wikipedia

Comments

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...

Search This Blog