• rhacer@lemmy.world
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    11 days ago

    But it IS how we see prices. If there weren’t science behind it, they wouldn’t be doing it.

    • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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      10 days ago

      The science is about how you initially react to the number. Your brain will see $19, and immediately you’ll think it’s $19. Only upon further inspection and processing through your cognition, you recognise that its $19.99, which is basically $20.

      It’s that initial reaction they want, to grab your attention. Anyone who is going through life without leveraging their higher thinking will fall for this shit. Anyone who thinks, at all, won’t.

      Unfortunately, there’s a nontrivial number of people who fall into that first category. People who were never taught to think. They just do.

    • PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      A lot of marketing strategies are pseudoscience. Just like a lot police investigation practices or body language assumptions.

          • Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee
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            11 days ago

            The CEO decided that clients were smart intelligent people and treated people as adults. Aka, no discounts, no 99 pricing, it just costs what it costs, as low as we can make it, plus our margin.

            JC Penny was already not too well, this helped sink them

            • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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              11 days ago

              Poor guy. Tried to do some good in the world and paid the price for it. Nobody ever went broke overestimating the stupidity of the average person.

              • Laurel Raven@lemmy.zip
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                10 days ago

                “Why would I pay $25 for these pair of pants at full price when I could pay $24.99 for those [identical] pants that are half off?! Clearly, that’s the better deal!”

                Hell, could probably even make it $29.99 for the identical pants and people will still go with that because they think they’re paying five more bucks and getting a $60 pair of pants

            • TehWorld@lemmy.world
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              11 days ago

              It was less about the .99 pricing and more about “Sale” pricing and ‘coupons’. Retailers will put a pair of pants on “Sale” for 50% off 51 weeks out of the year and people think they’re getting a great deal whereas when it’s not half off, they just don’t buy.

          • SuperEars@lemmy.world
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            10 days ago

            This doesn’t meet the bar you want, but my marketing professor called the .99 idea the single greatest thing to come out of marketing in a century.

            • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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              10 days ago

              Sounds about right.

              Marketing hasn’t done anything positive for humanity. It is all just to manipulate people into buying shit they don’t need. It is the main driver for the overconsumption.

      • BakerBagel@midwest.social
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        11 days ago

        I was watching a PBS documentary about the first humans in the Americas. All the scientists are super cool until you get to the American anthropologist who starts using phrenology to explain why Native American tribes shouldn’t be given repatriation rights, only for a Danish geneticist to say “yeah, this is absolutely a Native American and i am willing to testify to that in any court of law”

        Pseudoscience is still all the rage if it can be used to push a political agenda.