I just heard an ad on the radio where the announcer said that their product can be found at “twenty-six hundred and two locations”, and that really drew me up and made me have to process what she was saying. If I had wanted to be that specific, I would have said “two thousand, six hundred and two”, or else, “over twenty-six hundred locations”, but the way she said it sound really weird, to me. Is it just me?
Weird, but common. In casual speech, among people who don’t work with (or need to communicate with clarity) numbers on a daily basis, you often hear people sticking an “and” in a number somewhere other than the decimal place. I would have said it the same way you did.
Perfectly normal to my ears.
If you were able to phrase it differently, then you obviously knew what she meant. Maybe it could have been clearer but it was clear enough.
Was it a live read? It’s a pretty common mistake when reading numbers live, but would be a weird mistake to leave in a recorded ad.
No, it was a recorded ad.
They could say 130 score and 2 and even though I’d know what they meant, it’s weird sounding, too.
“Twenty-six hundred and two” is a year in the future, not a counting number.
Mine as well. Maybe just distinctive enough to be noticed more, as is the goal of any advertisement.
No, “Twenty-six hundred and two” is an arithmetic problem. The listener must actually do the math (hopefully mentally) to know what the sum is. 
When I write personal checks, say for $726.45, on the line where it gets written in words I often write something like “Seven hundred and twenty-six and 45/xx”. I kinda sorta know that the first “and” doesn’t belong there, but I’ve never gotten any grief over it.
(ETA: I don’t know what’s with this tradition of writing the cents portion with the /xx notation, but it seems to be how it’s commonly done.)
Elsewhere on this board, there’s a whole thread full of people who would pronounce OP’s number “two six zero two”. You can buy our product at two six zero two locations! And they all think that sounds perfectly normal!
Agreed, it’s an arithmetic problem. The year would usually be twenty-six-oh-two, I think?
I’d say the ad’s usage is idiosyncratic at best. But the bigger failure in the ad is the use of an inappropriate number of significant figures for the context, as pointed out by OP. The product can be found at over 2000 locations. Even 2 significant figures is superfluous, let alone 4.
Nah. That underplays it too much, I’d think. You could round properly and say “almost 3000” locations, but that overstates it too much. I think “over 26 hundred” is a good way to say it.
I do agree with the OP that it sounds weird, though. Twenty-six hundred is informal, so I wouldn’t expect precision.
Is it really a mistake?
I am not a native English speaker but learned English in school in Germany. The English we learned was mostly Standard British English. I am quite sure, that we learned to add the word “and” before the last numeral of such a number. So I would say “two thousand and two” would be the standard way to say the number 2602. What I find weird is the usage of “twenty six hundred” instead of “two thousand six hundred”, but I know that using the hundreds is common in the US.
Another factor here is the cost of time. In a commercial, more time means higher cost. Every extra syllable means more time. Looking at the entire commercial message, the script editor tries to trim out excess syllables to lower the cost while still delivering an effective message.
11 syllables: two thousand six hundred and two locations
10 syllables: twenty six hundred and two locations
It’s a little shorter. And to my ears it flows better. But…
8 syllables: over two thousand locations
is shorter still. So maybe they like the flow, the brevity, and the specificty of twenty six hundred and two. And that doesn’t sound weird to me.
It’s not a mistake. The only thing odd about it is perhaps the use of hundreds, but I use it the same way with years. “In the year nineteen hundred and two,” for instance. So “twenty six hundred and two” sounds completely unremarkable to me. There are some who claim that “and” is only supposed to be used before the beginning of a decimal, or some such weirdness, (and some have even insisted to me that “and” means the decimal point itself, so “one hundred and one dalmatians” would be "100.1 dalmatians), but speakers in my dialect (Great Lakes, US) commonly use “and” in this fashion. Heck, even the trailer for Disney’s film "101 Dalmations says “one hundred and one dalmatians” at the end.
I think the excessive precision is intentional. To the layman’s ear, “over two thousand locations” means “Lots, but we’re not sure exactly how many”. But “Twenty-six hundred and two locations” means “We’ve counted each and every one of them, because that’s the diligent sort of folks we are, and so we know exactly how many there are”. In other words, they’re trying to sound like nerds, never mind that usage among actual nerds is exactly opposite.
I’m pretty sure dropping the “and” after “hundred” is an Americanism.
I agree, and it has nothing to do with the word “and.” Product can be found at “over twenty-six hundred locations” is what would sound the most natural to me.
I don’t have any issue with the “and” I was pointing out that it’s a pretty common mistake when reading from left to right to not really know if you need to start “twenty six” or “two thousand six”. You almost have to read the number from right to left to determine where to start. For a live read, I could totally understand someone starting out “twenty six” and then quickly realizing and correcting it as best they could. For a recorded spot, I’m not so sure.
Listen to the experts on the pronunciation of years:
In the year twenty-five twenty-five . . .
In the year thirty-five thirty-five . . .
In the year forty-five forty-five . . .
. . .
In the year seventy-five ten . . .
In the year eighty-five ten . . .