Rant of the Day

What’s the deal with gas prices being in 9/10′s? Are we so stupid that we think that $3.89 9/10′s is not $3.90? No other country in the world does this except the United States of America. Plus, as someone pointed out … you can’t have a decimal with a fraction! What’s the deal with that?

I can’t believe that more people are not up in arms about this. I saw signs while driving back from the San Francisco Airport in both LED and hard numbers that included the fraction. How much energy goes into keeping this arcaic form of pricing and why do people allow this?

And all the gas companies doing the same thing?

Do we buy bread at $1.48 9/10′s? And why is it set at 9/10′s? Why not 3/10′s or 3/7ths? or even $3.899? Or $3.8958 like a currency converter?

Here’s one online rant I found:

So why do gas stations tease strung-out customers over a tenth of a cent? Is the industry run by evil hucksters? Perhaps, but that’s not the reason for the unorthodox pricing.
Theories abound, but none are definitive. The Mail Tribune newspaper in Medford, Oregon, quotes Craig Randolph, an oil company’s V.P. of retail operations. He says the nine-tenths of a cent is just a marketing gimmick that likely begun during the 1970 “gas wars.” Over the years, it became the standard.

This site on Arizona gas prices offers a different theory. It argues that the precision of nine-tenths gives motorists a “false sense of accuracy” over their purchase. It goes on to state that this method of pricing “requires that almost all purchases be rounded to the nearest whole cent,” which benefits oil companies.

Dr. James Madachy believes it’s primarily a marketing thing (“It looks cheaper”), but acknowledges charging nine-tenths of a cent can be unfair to the consumer. According to Madachy, the state of Iowa “outlawed the practice for four years during the 1980s.” However, the movement (if you can call it that) didn’t have much success.

Attributed above to

http://www.trinidadco.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=3383