Retailers don't do this because of published studies. They do it because they've tested it internally for the last 40 years.
When I started my selling software, I priced with something.99 too. I did this because everyone else did. I was unfamiliar with these sorts of things so I followed on.
I am sure that in some business at some point, there was a big positive in switching to that sort of pricing.
When I switched my software to whole numbers, I did not notice a drop in sales. Things continued to grow. Of course, my business is one data point and a small one.
How much of why we tend to do this is because, historically or normally, that is how we've seen it done?
The trial of whole number pricing keeps coming up in Consumer and Retail every 10- 15 years and EVERY time the test shows .99 works. Despite how most of us and even my younger self hated it.
Also, even knowingly false propaganda has an effect on you.
It isn’t as if retailers can fight reality.
Or that they can “come clean” by putting fine print under prices explaining why they are ending prices in 9. Which would create a major distraction messing with any sale.
It is just real-world reliable wackiness that both sellers and purchasers should be aware of.
There is no purely objective way to relate to selling and purchasing prices. Short of very simple scenarios where a spreadsheet actually captured all the real criteria.
Many products make people happier if the price is higher. Is that happiness bump a fraud, or the point?
Just remember to ask for $199,999.99 salary in your next interview!
Why would they do that? That might lessen their sales if people knew of the effect, as a nocebo.
> Which would create a major distraction messing with any sale.
And yet we fall for the same tricks again and again. The most politically pressing? The number of people - internationally - who believe in a strongman leader.
MLMs also occur to me. We know MLMs so well that we've literally written laws against them. There are movies, articles, conversations. And yet, every single year, tons of people fall for them.
What other very well-known tricks do people fall for HN?
Both work despite people knowing they exist.
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2359/the-origin...
I think a walk through a shopping mall might provide some clear evidence.
I don't think so.
/s
OK.
There would be some outliers or weird niche customer populations.
Practices like this stick around because of the desire to be seen making proactive recommendations with putative benefit.
With the dresses there is clearly something odd happening. In all cases except one the cheapest dresses sold the fewest items even compared to ones that were $10 more expensive.
The actual human might care about pain. Therefore, I don't think that the advice is necessarily bad.
Evolution isn't always our friend. There are many examples where our bodies work against us, only to help us evolve better as a species.
Do you mind sharing any references
One manifestation of this phenomenon in it's extreme form is cancer diagnosis and treatments. Barring a few exceptions, most cancer treatments are useless.
My brother buys these. They survive up to a year in his "care", rather than the usual 3-4 months of flimsier phones. They all end up with cracked screens within months though.
Almost no mainstream consumer electronics nowadays are meant for people who lead active lives (outside of planned and streamlined activities like going to the gym or running) - because the people as a whole generally don't live active lives. If you happen to be an outlier, making your phone survive becomes a serious logistical issue. Sadly carrying one is a necessity in this day and age.
Another example: Many offroad vehicles/trucks nowadays won't survive days of the advertised use-cases without serious damage and are often utterly unsuited for it (the cybertruck isn't an outlier here). These things are being sold to people who like to play pretend. Manufacturers cross their fingers and hope you don't actually.
Notable exceptions to the rule are things like satellite communicators and some dedicated GPS map devices. They seem to have no issue surviving many phones with their own screens and functionality intact. Their manufacturers know you wouldn't buy them if you didn't plan to use them in the advertised conditions.
Look at the form factor of something like the Garmin eTrex[1] series and it should be immediately apparent why these devices can outlive about a dozen phones. Sit on it, throw it on the ground, put it in a backpack and throw it down a cliff, they'll be fine. Maybe dented and scratched, but they'll still help you find your way. They're small devices that are very round-ish in every dimension, and they're also pretty light, meaning there's very little energy that needs to be dissipated when they impact something.
Adding padding and protection only helps up to a point. To make smartphones actually durable, you'd need to take away from them. That means little or no glass at all. Use light materials that functionally survive deformation and point contact impacts. Also preferably it would run on AA batteries.
[1] https://bikepacking.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/garmin-et...
I think it was Vertu who first recognized the potential back in early 2000s, The Matrix (1999) made a visual point of it, and since 2007, Apple has been building their entire strategy based on that, with enormous success.
People who need sturdy phones do exist, are few, and they don't brandish them, because these phones are well-beaten.
Although normie friends have commented on why I bought a OnePlus3 instead of something normal like a Samsung.
"Half the lines of code I write are useless, I just don't know which half." - an incompetent coder
"Half the time I spend on the phone is wasted, I just don't know which half" - an incompetent salesperson
"Half of my menu is inedible, I just don't know which half" - an incompetent restauranteur
If I think about it too, half the lines of code being wasted is probably a relatively reasonable measure for writing code. Not because they're actually literally useless, but because you write a lot of scaffolding, a lot of first passes and a lot of code that will be a dead end or superseded before you're done. If you knew before you started exactly what lines of code you'd need to write, you'd be much more efficient, but we don't, so we write a lot of "waste" code too.
Legacy code in a nutshell. On some blue moon you get a chance to do a clean refsctor, but otherwise business doesn't care if 90% of the code is useless.
Even as the refactorer, you know that refactoring can be anywhere from throwing away simple unused code, to removing a seeming unneeded line and causing a forest fire. I imagine that's the equivalent with advertising (i.e I agree with you).
Not if there too a spend of X was required to get the value of X/2.
That doesn't cheapen metrics, however. Some pretty meaningful (and, often, annoying) stuff has come from them.
And even if 9.99 really is 10 for you, it could mean that you're different than most people, rather than the methodology being faulty.