Why have contestants on “The Price is Right” become so much worse at guessing?

I wouldn't guess that memory is the issue so much as less exposure to this type of information in the first place. We no longer aimlessly browse stores checking everything out; now we just search for specific items, buy them, and move on.

I can probably recall the prices of things I've actually purchased about as well as past generations, but anything beyond that is basically a wild guess.

As someone who's been keto for just about my entire adult life, the humor of "I mean it's one banana Michael. What could it cost, $10?"[1] was almost lost on me.

1: https://youtu.be/Nl_Qyk9DSUw

Confusopoly (aka Dilbert's confusopoly) is confusing marketing designed to prevent the buyer making informed decisions.

(...) The term has been adopted by economists. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Richard Cordray, championing meaningful regulation for the financial industry, used the term confusopoly to refer to large financial institutions (Cordray 2014, 4'04"-4'26") :

"There's actually an economic term for this; it's called "Confusopoly." If [the sellers] can confuse the consumer enough then the consumers won't necessary know what choice they're making and they can be talked into just about anything." — Richard Cordray, 2014/01/08

Like outside of a couple products I probabbly can't tell you what most groceries or consumer products cost. There's just so many to keep track of, and that's saying something as I shop / cook a great deal.

I seriously would dramatically under or overbid on a can of soup.

To be truly effective at these games, you needed to be watching what the accepted show price of items were...you never could assume your local store price or dealership price.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a7922/price-is-right-p... :

"Terry Kniess studied prices. He saw that virtually every prize on The Price Is Right, from a pack of gum to the flashiest car, repeated. He and Linda memorized their values the way Terry had learned to count cards. When they felt they were ready, they made their way to California.... "Actual retail price, $23,743," Carey said. "You got it right on the nose. You win both Showcases.""

"The producers no longer rely on Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup; now they have different soups. They have different everything. They've built more luck into the games, dumb luck, and they've started doing sneaky things like changing the options on the cars — adding floor mats, taking away the stereo system — to mess with the prices. And they've started adding more luxury items, like Burberry coats, the sorts of things for which ordinary people who have lived their ordinary lives would never have clipped a coupon."

You can study for the Price is Right right now: https://quizlet.com/218097429/the-price-is-right-study-guide...

Though I don't vouch for how accurate that's going to be after the changes.

Based on what I could read of the article, and what other people are saying in response, I suspect the article is basically ruined by the fact that it was deliberately made harder. Of course after it was deliberately made harder, people did worse. There's not a lot of conclusions to be drawn from that data point, even trendy ones like "addiction to cell phones", which may ruin 90% of the people's memories but another fraction may be using their cell phones to run SRS programs to memorize everything. (You can waste a lot of time on cell phones, sure, but they can be powerfully turned to the light side if you take a bit of time to figure out how.)

Included but not limited to: New/repeat customer, country of connection, device used to connect, previous purchasing or even searching habits.

You can test this in the UK by searching for a holiday. Do it once on an android phone using your normal account and then do it again via a macbook as a guest of the site.

and from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15986984

The Perfect Bid (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdFKZtZop7A) went over this in more detail after a player and long time watcher (Ted Slauson) managed to win both showcases. For years, the show had used a set of household goods that had a consistent price. Ted memorized all of the prices and won both showcases at the end.

The producer freaked out over the incident and started to use more items and ones that add-ons that made guessing the price more difficult. They did that because they didn't want their winnings budget blown out. In recent years, they have been using more generic items like 'free utilities for a year' to make it more random.

TPIR is a very US show. In most of the world, especially going back to when the show began, the idea of a product having "a" price is laughably absurd. Everything is haggled over.