If you live in the USA or in other country that uses dollar as currency, like Canada and Australia, you are used to prices as the following ones: $199, $2.99 and $37.90. That is also probably the case if you live in country that uses peso, since peso are also abbreviated with the dollar sign. Yet if you are from a country that has the euro as currency, you are used to 149 €, 5,98 €, 49,99 €. And it is also not that hard to see prices like £6.99, ¥789, R$188,80 , 299 руб and ₹897 worldwide.

What is all these prices have in common is psychological pricing, an old marketing trick employed very often in retail. Such expedient is already widespread throughout the globe for some years or decades and, for this reason, wherever you go, physically or through the internet, you will find lots of stores adopting the psychological pricing. Since your are accustomed to prices with fulls of nines, they  don’t bother most of the time. But once in a while a $99.99 (or a 99,99 €) in a department store calls your attention. “What is the point to have a value that is just one cent below the hundred mark?”

The answer is inside ourselves. We all know consciously that 99.99 is very near to 100 and the one-cent discount is too small to be considered itself a good deal. The next deductive step is to observe what the department store intends with this price that is just below hundred. It tries to induce us to think that 99.99 is “ninety and something”, a value that would be closer to 90 than it really is. However, at this level of awareness, we may do more than just rounding up the number.

We may realize the just-below prices require us to spend a scarce and, therefore, expensive resource of our brain: the capacity to pay attention to the things. Yes, always rounding up odd prices costs us more than we usually expected. Wasting our attention in this way should be avoid for the common good. It benefits all, including stores and supermarkets.

If you already know well the subject and is also convinced that any customer should have the moral right of not being misled by just-below prices, the solution proposed by this moment will a lot of sense to you. Otherwise, it is worth reading more about the nuisances of the problem which made you lose thousands of dollars throughout your life (or equivalent in your currency).