Psychology aside, when I was a wee waddler working my first retail job, my boss told me that the reason they priced items ending in 99 cents specifically at his store was because the change from a dollar left over was a shortcut to telling the cashier how many items had been rung up. “Rung up” itself being very apt in this case, because when he started his business back in the Lower Cretaceous period, they used mechanical cash registers that went ding and everything, but didn’t have fancy electronic readouts of the running total and items registered so far. If the customer handed you seven items you knew that the pennies end of the change if you rounded up to a dollar should be $XX.93, and you could use that to tell handily if you missed anything or double-rung something.
It seems that the prospect of “losing” a penny in the sense of making a $1 item 99 cents instead was probably a better proposition versus having cashiers let un-rung items walk out the door all the time.
Psychology aside, when I was a wee waddler working my first retail job, my boss told me that the reason they priced items ending in 99 cents specifically at his store was because the change from a dollar left over was a shortcut to telling the cashier how many items had been rung up. “Rung up” itself being very apt in this case, because when he started his business back in the Lower Cretaceous period, they used mechanical cash registers that went ding and everything, but didn’t have fancy electronic readouts of the running total and items registered so far. If the customer handed you seven items you knew that the pennies end of the change if you rounded up to a dollar should be $XX.93, and you could use that to tell handily if you missed anything or double-rung something.
It seems that the prospect of “losing” a penny in the sense of making a $1 item 99 cents instead was probably a better proposition versus having cashiers let un-rung items walk out the door all the time.