The penny rant

[gothaminserenia]

It's time for a pet peeve. Of them all, this is the one that irritates me most often. In fact, I can't believe I've never ranted about it here before.

WHY IN THE WORLD do businesses still refuse to price their products in even numbers?!

Switch to Qwest High-Speed Internet, only $19.99 a month ... The Ginsu 36-Piece Knife Set, $24.99 ... the

Comments

[ferrousoxide]

I hear ya. That's always ticked me off. However, i don't have your penchant for righteous anger about it. ;)

How are you enjoying updating lj (or downloading porn) 50x faster? ;P

[gothaminserenia]

Not righteous anger ... just indignation. I really wanted to write a post that everyone would remember when they're out shopping. Because, as they say in Pump Up The Volume ... the truth is a virus.

I do enjoy posting to LJ and not having my posts disappear off into LJ-wonderland.

Well, with all the viruses and spyware loaded onto porn, it really slows down the connection ... I may as well have stuck with dialup. ;-P

[deadpansev]

It doesn't bother me that much, but only because I never know what the real price is going to be on ANYTHING. So I only use posted prices in comparison to similar products. I am actually surprised when things cost what they are posted as. I mean if I see a soda whether it is posted as costing a dollar or 99 cents, the actual price is probably going to be more like $1.07 after sales tax is added in. Qwest high speed internet is unlikely to actually cost you less than $20.

[gothaminserenia]

See, now that's the other aspect that's deceptive. Even the few customers who get excited thinking they're getting a better deal, end up being disappointed, because $19.99 becomes well over $20 once sales taxes get piled on.

[deadpansev]

Yeah taxes and other fees placed on top of products, create extreme amounts of chaos in peoples lives. You can't really even accurately calculate it in most cases, for instance where I live there is no sales tax on prepackaged foods, but something like an 8.3% on ready to eat foods and then regular items have a 7.5% tax and I am not even sure of these numbers because they are all fractional and and they tend to change with ballot initiatives, etc. You try and do the math at the grocery store when some items have tax, some don't, and instead of an even number you are trying to calculate a fractional rate.

I HATE THAT SH1T TOO. F*** PENNIES!

[rskm1]

I think the history of the $X.99 prices goes back to some guy in the early 20th century who published a paper that he sold for $0.01. Nobody was buying it because nobody carried friggin' pennies around with them, even way back then when they were actually WORTH something.

So this guy singlehandedly convinced local shopkeepers to lower their prices one penny, making the argument that people would PERCEIVE them as cheaper. (Nobody really DOES; people aren't that stupid. But apparently business owners THINK people are that stupid)

TODAY, I can make a compelling opposite argument. The copper needed to make a copper penny is WORTH MORE THAN $0.01! So they have to make pennies out of some cheaper lightweight metal and then copper-plate them. What's wrong with this picture??? Is it even worth the expense of producing such worthless coins?

Here's my proposal: (sorry, I should prolly be ranting in my own d^mn blog, but you've inspired me

Re: I'll bet you didn't know ...

[gothaminserenia]

I'd go further than that. The penny, the nickel, AND the dime should be abolished. When I was a kid, nobody bothered to pick up pennies lying on the ground even back then. Today, I see nickels & dimes on the ground. The quarter is really the only useful coin left. The rest are just loose change. Prices really should be rounded to the nearest quarter.

Did you know that at one time, the cent was so valuable that we also needed a 2-cent coin and a 3-cent coin? And get a load of this ... the penny was too big to use in some transactions, so we even needed a half-cent coin!

But yeah, I remember when the face-value of the penny dropped below the value of its copper, so Reagan replaced the copper with copper-plated zinc. The funny thing is, now even the zinc is more valuable than face-value. Last year I remember Congress debating trying to find something even more worthless to make pennies out of. Maybe they'll make them out of plasticThe root of the problem is really the Federal Reserve's inflation of the money supply. The Fed

..and an extra "YEAH, FXXX YOU" to gas stations!

[rskm1]

That extra $0.009 on a gallon of gas really is the ultimate, though.

I'm tempted to quit paying for gas with a credit card and instead, carry a bag o' coins and a calculator around in the car. Then when buying gas, read the gallons off the pump, multiply that by $2.499 (or whatever the posted price is), round the total *DOWN* to the nearest penny, and pay at the register with exact change.

More likely than not, this amount will be LESS that the total price the pump displays. The clerk will notice, and demand the extra penny.

So give it to them.

And then demand they give change.

(Hey, they're the ones charging the fractional-penny prices!)

Re: ..and an extra "YEAH, FXXX YOU" to gas stations!

[deadpansev]

Andy Rooney did this on 60 minutes once. He would buy exactly 1 gallon of gas ans try to get change.

[redghost]

They just want an excuse to say It costs less than 20 bucks.