It’s very rare to find a gas station selling gas for $2.50 or $2.34. Why are the cents of gas prices rarely even digits?
Adam
It’s just the $99.99 thing cut slightly smaller.
$2.46[sup]88[/sup] may as well be $2.47, but it looks cheaper than it is.
while the price of gas (almost) always ends in 9, I’ve never noticed the whole cents portion being odd more than even. I just paid 2.769 for gas the other day, and one other station nearby has 2.789 gas going.
A look at www.austingasprices.com doesn’t show a particularly strong bias for odd cents values, although 2.799 is the most common price.
But that doesn’t have anything to do with odd/even (2.47[sup]99[/sup] may as well be 2.48, but it looks cheaper than it is).
I’m not seeing this. Of course, there’s always the .9 cents at the end, but I haven’t noticed any trend in the cents digit. Currently looking at my city’s listed gas prices, the front page seems pretty evenly split between odd and even cents, which is what I would expect.
I forgot the link I meant to include. Looks like aktep had it all covered anyway, but what the hell, it’s a different city:
It pisses me off, I’ll tell you that.
It’s a completely arbitrary pricing format. If you buy 10 gallons of gas at x.xx9/10 per gallon, you pay an extra 9 cents.
Maybe there’s a valid backstory to the 9/10 cent stuff, but these days it just amounts to extra profit.
I read the OP as “Why do gas prices rarely end with x cents even?”
(ie; It could have been phrased as “It’s very rare to find a gas station selling gas for $2.51 or $2.35. Why are the cents of gas prices rarely even digits?” or one might similarly ask “It’s rare to find gas being sold for $2 or $3. Why are the dollars of gas prices rarely even digits?”)
Of course, my interpretation is mainly influenced by its relation to an observable and addressable phenomena. I’ve never noticed odd numbers predominating in gas prices, either.
I’m with the ones who say it makes gasoline seem cheaper. If gas is $2.999/gallon, I say it’s three bucks a gallon. But most people I know will call it $2.99/gallon.
Maybe. But since we get that question about once every two weeks ( with the same answers and the same debate about whether we’re getting ripped off for 9/10 of a cent or if we’re coming out ahead 1/10 of a cent), I was hoping it was something different.
How are you getting “ripped off”? The gas station sets a price and you either agree to pay it or not.
You’re getting ripped off because you’re being asked to pay in units of currency that don’t exist. You can’t give them $2.999. Let’s use some round numbers:
5 gallons of gas at $3.00: $15.00
5 gallons of gas at $3.009: $15.045
I think it was Andy Rooney who once bought exactly one gallon of gas and tried to get his 1/10 cent back. They wouldn’t give it to him.
So what you’re saying is, when they set the price higher, you pay more? Say it isn’t so!
Hey I’m not the one saying we get ripped off. I’m just saying that’s one of the arguements that comes up. FTR, I think if it wasn’t 3.009, then it’d just be 3.01.
Well duh. What I’m saying is it’s a crappy, confusing, and pointless thing to ask for 9/10 of a cent when you can’t pay that.
I don’t know if this is the explanation you keep getting every two weeks, but it’s the only recent factual one I could find extant on the www.