I remember learning this in 4th grade. There was a drugstore (Walgreens? Snyder’s?) that would have some letters on their pricetag. The letters corresponded to “blackstone” where b=1, l=2, a=3, c=4 et al. This represented the price that the drugstore had paid for the item. So, if the pricetag said c.kn, they had paid $3.59 for it. The regular price was obviously almost always more than that. (I recall walking around the drugstore after learning that and looking at the prices vs. the blackstone).
So are there any stores that use this kind of system still?
My family used a version of the same system in our hardware store when I was growing up. Ours was based on my name. I haven’t thought about that system in years.
I have done lots of work implementing large retail inventory systems and all that stuff is computerized now. There are also retail accounting methods like LIFO, and FIFO that make that type of thing obsolete. I say that it is gone from all large chains in the U.S.
I used to work for a rare-book dealer who’d mark what he paid for things on the front flyleaft in pencil – in that situation, there would be no particular advantage to automating that system, since he had sole responsibility for buying and for charging anything other than the price he originally assigned (or the standard discount to other dealers).
Yonks ago, I’d been told that the Osco drug chain (then partnered with Jewel Food Stores, now a part of Albertsons) used CHARLESTON for this.
I never did understand the need for the store to put their presumed cost on the item. In a scenario such as the used bookstore **twickster ** used to work at, I could see where you’d need to know what had been paid for an item when a customer says “Will you take X for it?” so you don’t sell it at a loss. But, there’s generally no dickering over the price of a bottle of aspirin at a chain store.
Its primary purpose wasn’t for dickering. It was for inventory valuation and accounting. Retailers always have to have a way to value inventory for their own purposes, tax purposes, and insurance purposes. Computers take care of that for the big retailers now.
My grandfather used a phrase to do the same thing (I won’t mention it because I use it from time to time to keep passwords secret). It was useful to know what you paid for an item if, for instance, you had a few on the shelves and you didn’t remember the original wholesale price. Did it go up? You’d to find one on the shelf and see if it had.