this has always just felt like propaganda from marketing people to sustain their business of selling ads to companies lol, like no most ads don't fucking make me buy their stuff.
SOME ads make me buy their stuff, ads that are just "here's our product, our product is good for these reasons, also here's a cute cat".
But ads that make me cringe with force enough to crack my spine do not fucking inspire me to buy anything from the company, they make me go out of my way to never ever support the company if i can at all help it.
JCPenney tried changing all their prices ending with .99 to the round dollar amount. It was catastrophic for their sales, so they changed it back. It was a part of a larger plan by Ron Johnson (former senior VP of retail at Apple) to get rid of the "pricing game" of stores and to stop deceiving customers with fake sales/markdowns and deceptive pricing. It caused JCPenney's stock to halve and then some, and got him fired within 15 months. Here's an ad they showed that apologized to customers for using accurate & honest pricing instead of deceiving them, and begging them to come back
The power of the number "9" isn't confined to the cents column, either. One American clothing retailer experimented by changing the price of a dress from $34 to $39 dollars and increased sales by over 30%.
Consumers are fucking idiots. Humans are stupid dumb animals that like patterns too much for their own good and short circut their brain immediately after seeing minimal information to fill in the blanks. If you like patterns so much, why don't you marry them? Hmmm???
Pfft, silly object-oriented devs. My children are named Typeclass and Iterator! Scala Design Patterns prove themselves to reign supreme once again. Enjoy sending your kids to public coding bootcamp.
This is also why gas pumps measure gasoline to the thousandth of a gallon. Consumers LOVE to see those numbers racing upwards and think, "Whoaaaaa! Look at those numbers GO! I must be getting an awesome deal!"
It's a deliberate psychological trick, played on you by energy companies to fool you into thinking you're getting more than you really are.
A lot of research has gone into this and for better or worse it works so well that any price not set this way is not getting the best results for the seller.
As it turns out there hasn't been a lot of research into this. There was research on it that is the goto but I believe it references old catalog sales only(like sears) and not in store.
Edit: it may be more like people view products with a decimal price as cheap and products with whole numbers as quality.
$600 phone - "GOD DAMMIT!!! WHY DID MY NOTE 4 FROM 2014 HAVE TO DIE??? I PAID $65 FOR THAT PHONE, AND IT WAS FUCKING GREAT!!!"
$0.00 app - "Why the hell does this calculator app need permission to access my contacts, the internet, and the ability to transfer data??? YOU'RE A GOD DAMN CALCULATOR APP!!! I'm not downloading that clear piece of spyware....."
This is an important point! Consumers have different price expectations depending on the context. A $20 video game might look cheap on console but be outrageously expensive for mobile.
What gets me about most mobile games is they ask for that payment but STILL inject ads and/or other micro transactions.
Or that'll be the Price for a shitty port of a game over 20 years old, that's worse than just emulating it. Looking at you Square Enix.
Always take the free shipping, even if prices are (mostly) the same. If you have to return something, you don't always get a refund on the shipping costs.
And the register registers every sold item, so unless the cashier fakes the beep sound and the customer ignores the missing receipt, it won't work since the till would be short.
And even if the cashier bypasses the register entirely, they could keep change outside the till if they want to pocket money.
Back in the day, the trick was when you owe the customer, say, 78 cents, you short them a quarter and only give them 53 cents. You still take that quarter out of the till, you just hold it with your pinkie so the cameras cant see it while you hand the rest of the change to the customer. If they notice they got shorted, you just say "oh sorry" and reopen the till to hand them the quarter thats still in your pinkie. But if they dont notice, you just made a quarter. This relies on you being able to memorise who youve shorted and not short the same person multiple times without a long time in between, because then people start to get sus
If given exact change you can just cancel the order and pocket the cash you can still get caught if they ask for a receipt or if the inventory is short and they do a deep investigation.
I do not want pennies. I've tried telling cashiers I don't want pennies. I always get the pennies.
I once asked a cashier about this; that person told me that the cashier is responsible for the till and that means trouble if they're under or over any amount, so they can't just not give you change.
At some places, they have little jars where the cashier can drop unwanted change, but at most places in the US, if you use cash you just have to accumulate essentially useless ballast.
I feel the same about restaurants. The advertised price is $15. But then you add on tax + tip. Then there is the cost of travel + any other little costs.