Ever since I was a young lad (and many moons have passed since then)gasoline prices at any service station have always been priced with a 9/10ths in the price. It has never been $1.76 7/10 or $2.00 3/10 but always had the 9/10 after the price. Does anyone know why? Why don’t they just round it up to the nearst penny and do away with this foolishness? Or is this just the result of another government boondogle? Any and all answers are welcome.
Nothing to do with the government; this one’s a corporate boondoggle. If you’re selling your gas at $1.77 flat, and the fellow across the road is selling hers at $1.76 9/10, you’d be surprised how many people won’t fill up at your pump because it’s ‘cheaper across the road’, even when they’re putting in less than 5 gallons and paying exactly the same amount, to the penny.
I’m old enough to remember when Canada switched to metric. It’s been 24 years now. People selling meat still sell it by the pound; why? Because pounds ‘weigh less’ than kilogrammes, and people would rather pay $2 per pound than $4.40 per kg. (Although some cleverer people will now charge 44 cents per 100 g.) On the other hand, the gas stations switched over en masse, as quick as they could change their pumps over. Why? Well, people would rather pay 21.3 cents per litre (the price at the time) instead of 96.9 cents per gallon. Note: Now that the price has gone up to the 70-80 cents/L range, most of the stations have gone back to ‘.9’ on the end of the per-litre price. Perception is everything.
It is not only gas stations, everybody does it. $199.99 sound like a lot less than $200. Hasn’t Cecil already addressed the origins of this as going back many many decades?