Why Literally (Almost) Every Price Ends in 99 Cents 

“$5.99” Me when buying for myself: “It’s 6 dollars.” Me when asking someone to buy something for me: “It’s only 5 dollars, come on!”

Squarespace seems so cheap until you realize it's $156 per year :l

From my retail experience, when a price ends in .00, it usually means the item is new. When it ends in .99 the item is on sale, .98 means Everyday Low Price, and .97 means clearance. Very helpful for employees to determine sale/clearance items.

So a 1 dollar pack of pasta at coles is luxurious?

So, if an item was priced at $0.99 would your brain perceive it as free?

I've got 99 problems, and being broke is definitely one of them.

"litterally almost every price" "that's 60% of products"

$0.0003 per minute rounds to $0, so SquareSpace is free. Edit: wow thats a lot of likes

Does anyone else see $5.99 as $6.00? I guess I just have 200IQ

So technically everything is a trick, since all satisfy in Trick 1, 2, or 3.

When I worked in automotive sales, I would employ what I called the "Oddly specific number trick." The idea is, let's just say on a purchase that is either perceived as, or is normally negotiable, the customer has little idea of what a "good deal" is because they often either have no idea what the markup is relation to the cost, or have noticed that discounts on vehicles vary wildly depending on the manufacturer, specific model, cost, or even what month it is. There is normally no consistent percentage off to compare to. So, if after negotiating for hours over a vehicle that has an MSRP of $37,995, I might be given the "OK" from management to sell said vehicle at $35,500 if that number reflects a comfortable enough profit margin for the dealership, however, I may present the "best price" as $35, 523. This gives the customer the impression that since the price is so specific, it must be calculated as a "bare minimum" price the dealership could accept in order not to operate at a loss.

only the most refined, most luxurious, most lavish products are priced at whole numbers dollar stores

2:40 even on a video like this you managed to slide planes in

so you can say "keep the change" when you pay 10 dollars for an item worth $9.99

I hate shopping in the USA because tax is not included so I just add 3 dollars tot he price just to be safe. So if if the price says 5.99 i think 9 dollars

Who dafuq does NOT round 5.99 to 6.00?

I've always rounded the 99 cents up to one dollar, even when i'm telling someone the price.

There is a company in the UK that used to advertise less than £100 It was always £99.99 and it was infuriating!! You know who you are Argos

Wait... watch the beginning promotion with captions on... WENDOVER?!?

I thought it was like that to have a reason to use pennies. Because seriously, nobody *needs* to use pennies.

The terrible jokes are really the main reason I am watching that. Who does not know the 99cent trick?

When I see 9.99 I just think about 10

When I was younger, I noticed this when we went shopping and asked my dad this same question. My dad told me about how our mind is dumb. Ever since then, my dad always made me pay attention to the 99 and made me round up. So whenever I wanted something, I'd have to tell him the price by rounding up. Now I have no problem at all with the stupid 99 price tags.

1:44 Wtf this background music is fire tho

0:15 ah a man of great taste I see

Bad jokes cost 0.0001 cents per millisecond

0:35 *HA! That’s where you’re wrong, friend.*

3:56 "You have become the very thing you swore to destroy"

To make it seem less expensive? Or tax

"...at 0.0003 cents per minute." Huh that's low... ... ... Wait

2:25 A circle has infinite points, because a circle is defined as: _'the set of all coplanar points a given distance (r) from a given point (c)'_ (r is the radius, and c the center).

This feels like a video your older brother Wendover should make

I know a few of the stores in my country like to put their price at .98, as it puts them over .99 on those price comparison websites.

I don't know how anyone can be fooled by the pricing trick. I always automatically round up to the nearest whole number. So 5.99 = 6.00

"Oh hi mark"

0:22 Is it weird that I recognize that the stock video of the mall was filmed in the "Palladium Mall" in Prague.

factorio is priced at $20.00 'nuff said.

So you should always have three products, so you can cover all your examples. One priced 2.99, the other priced 4.32 and the last priced at 10.

as someone with ocd i dont like buying things because its a massive annoyance that prices cant just be a whole number

After rewatching the video now over a whole year later, I got the referrence at 4:08 in the background to the "Why the UK Runs Trains to Nowhere" video xD

Pointless like a circle.

Whenever I see a price that ends in 99 cents, say $19.99, I automatically think $20. But whenever I see a price like $19.47, I think $19.

3:15 Me: *thinks about my family of 5 that all wants to watch Netflix at the same time*

Dude I swear the cuility of your marketing plug transitions is going up dramatically (it's amazing and I love it).

I also know one more trick companies use to attract customers, go and sponsor the majority of the creators on RU-vid - You get a free unskippable ad and the word of one's favourite RU-vidr on that

but can you... **PAY 399 FOR THIS AWESOME CHAIR**

"Few services advertise a yearly price" Nebula: "Hold my beer"

Phone costs: 699 dollars People: so it's 600 dollars?

In convexity theory, there is a notion called an extreme point that generalizes the notion of vertex (or corner) of a polygon. For this definition every point on a circle is an extreme point so it makes sense to say it has infinitely (uncountably!) many corners. Though the notion of side is not as good. If the definition is line segment joining two vertices then the answer would be 0 for the circle. @The Animator

Why does everyone upload today.... catching up with minutephysics, then Isaac Arthur, Smarter Every Day, Kurtzgesagt and now HAI.... dammit I want to study.... I need to study.... but.... just one... more... video...

I like that the squarespace ad including pricing perspective manipulation too.

Good so when something cost 20 I say it cost 19 to my parents

Another reason is that SALES WILL ALWAYS BE RECORDED when paying in cash. The till register drawer has to be opened in order to give the 1 cent change, so the company can record how many sales they make and ensure that the cashiers aren't just pocketing the money

so toyota corollas will end in a round pri- oh wait wrong channel

so basically every single way you write a price the consumer wants to buy it

$5.00 $6.00 "Big difference" *Cries internally*

Ohhhh Now it makes cents!

That self-loathing humor made you seem British

only $399

2:27 they have infinite points

What about the BS with portions on Nutritional Labels? A bag of cookies might say its only 33% of your daily recommended calories or fat intake, but the serving size is like 2 cookies and theres 12 cookies in the bag. Seems like they can list the “serving size” to almost any arbitrary value.

1:20 Knights don’t move like that Edit: he did stop the video early :P

0:22 no joke that is literally the mall i go to. It's called "Palladium" and I have no idea who the hell records it and shares it online lol.

Next video: why public figure endorsements work, but why you're still going to be buying whatever the heck I'm selling at the end of this.

ya, screw that: I conditioned myself to price things in my head as the whole number rounded up decades ago.

can you use a different color border in the thumbnail. It's hard for colorblind users to see wether they're seeing the frame or the youtube history progress bar (which is in red)

When we first got married, my wife would always ignore the .99 and so take the floor of the price instead of rounding up by the penny. It was maddening.

With the ability to compare supermarket prices using their websites, I noticed a while ago that Waitrose had a phase of selling identical brand items at the same price as Sainsbury's or Morrison's but adding 20p e.g. £1.99 / £2.19. It adds up if you're doing a big shopping trip. They've cut back on that - presumably I wasn't the only one who noticed. Of course, some would argue that if you're noticing prices you shouldn't be shopping in Waitrose (while I'm in Sainsbury's, my butler is getting my things in Waitrose).

Way to bring up the US debt in your video about marketing and psychology.

I checked your store, but there's no chest coverlet, at least certainly no bespoke ones. You better put the one you showed in your video up mister.

Idea for browser extension and/or augmented reality filter: A program that looks for prices and rounds them up so that only the first two digits will be non-zero. Maybe also include options for further restrictions like only using multiples of 5 for the second digit, always following the 1-2-5 pattern in the second digit, or always rounding to the smallest denomination which can pay the full price with a single banknote (eg. $11.99 would get rounded up to $20).

I think I enjoy these more than Wendover videos. So funny and only partially interesting!

Why did you place the cent symbol in front of the number instead of behind it?

in canada its .95 because we dont use worthless copper circles that have literally no value.

"I'm sure you are very intelligent." Hahahaha

You can almost always turn those tricks around if you're aware of them, in order to live more modest: I always round to the next 1 or 5 units of currency. I always look for the price per kg/L/piece (to not get screwed by those 255g instead of 275g packages). I always ask myself "What could I get with those $20/$60", and ask myself "How long would I need to work for this money". I always calculate monthly/yearly prices (for food: "What would it cost to eat like this every day), or even the total cost of ownership for big expenses. I always carry cash with me and never pay with cashless methods, because that hurts more psychologically and so inhibits excessive spending.

Yep, these tricks are all old... As a result I've long since taught myself to always round up the prices... 48.99 => 50; 1350 => 1400... Another nifty trick is to always add up all the items on the calculator (even old phones have that feature) and control your total rather than individual prices.

@Animator It has both! It depends on your perspective. If your frame of reference sees the circle as a whole it has none, if your frame of reference sees the circle for it's in individual parts (pixels, atoms, etc) then it has infinite as it would be impossible to track the starting point without leaving our frame of reference meaning you could go on ad infinitum without ever knowing how far you are from the start or end.

LOST IT at 0.00003 cents per minute. Comic genius

I love the HAI shirt jokes.and after every video the marketing strategy is genius

Another thing when you have three options with the one you want to push in the middle is that it takes advantage of the centre stage effect. Humans have an implicit bias towards the middle option of a set of three the options on the end have to overcome that initial inertia in order to actually get chosen this happens to a point with any number of options greater than 2 though it's worse with uneven numbers.

BRICKS

0:21 the 6.5 scissors end in 49 LOL

If I remember my Marketing class correctly, these prices were invented by Melville E. Stone and spread mainly in the US. Then it spread throughout Europe mainly thanks to Thomas Bata when he always priced shoes from his company like that. I don't know about other territories.

The original reason was so workers wouldn’t steal money when working at the till, because they had to open it to give the penny/cent change

A circle has both none and infinite points; it's points are quantum values

I like the way "tons" transitioned into "tonnes"

Wow....I didn't know that trick about the random prices, and the other one about someone putting one set of services next to the other one that's just slightly more expensive. That was pretty good. Thanks.

When we were at the drugstore I asked my cousin and she said it's because it makes it sound cheaper, she's smart 😂

When something says something like 5.99$ I just say “oh, it’s just 6.00$” soooo yeaaaaaa k bye.

$0.0003 cents per minute was the best joke I've heard on this channel LOL

2:32 heeey i'm living here

So many claiming to be the first here but all i want is to be your last :(

I can´t finde the expensive shirt :(

OH MY GOD I JUST REALIZED THAT YOUR CHANNEL PROFILE PICTURE IS AN ILLUSION MY MIND IS BLOWN

The last trick to set the middle option sound cheap is called “Decoy Effect”.

Too much advertising x_x And no, I don't mean the products, I am ridicously tired hearing of Squarespace...

I'm starting to love how shameless this channel is about the advertising.

I rarely have the 99 cent trick trick me into thinking it's a dollar cheaper, but when it does I call it "getting 99'd" LUL

Am I the only one who just researches the things I buy, only buy what I need, and only at the lowest price I can find?