Also, please forgive any cock-ups on my part because I won't be able to fix them sneakily before anyone notices.
Anyway, here's today's photo:
This amused me because, if you look carefully, you'll see that the wine was reduced in price twice - once from £5.99 to £4.00 (fair enough), and then again from £4.00 to £3.99. Save a whole penny! Technically a double discount I suppose.
The photo was taken in a Sainsbury's supermarket a couple of months back.
6 comments:
JD you have more holidays than Judith Chalmers!
It's even more depressing when you're an American in England. What with the exchange rate, you don't even save a whole penny. You save, like, half a penny. Which is easy to forget when the ATM next to Christ's College spits out pretty-colored pounds at you -- so effortlessly, so like the ATMs at home -- and when you come across a vintage edition of "The Tale of Tom Kitten" at a used-book shop, which you absolutely must buy, and when a local suggests a Thai place that's great, if on the posh side . . . Next thing you know, you're on the plane back to D.C., and you're filling out the customs form, and you're declaring how much you paid for all the stuff you're bringing over, and you're doing it in U.S. dollars this time, not British pounds. Then you realize that all that pretty-colored money has turned into drab greenbacks, and boy oh boy, does that suck.
When I was a kid, there was a town near mine in which the shoe merchants all had adopted a different ".9x" for their prices; one priced all his shoes at prices ending in 97¢; another at 99¢; a third at 96¢.
The harder you work, Neil, the more holidays you are entitled to! By that reckoning you are next due a break in 2019...
Editrix - hope you had a good time in England, money matters aside.
I read the other day that the reason prices often end in .99 is so that the shop assistant is compelled to use the till to give the customer change - which, apparently, reduces the chances of the shop assistant pocketing the customer's money themselves. Don't know how much truth there is in this, though.
I've understood that the .99 is psychological. You see the big 3 in 3.99 and mentally think 3 dollars/pounds/euros. Here in the U.S., gas prices end in .nn9, e.g., 3.999. The smaller third 9 is painted on the signs, while the 3.99 can change. (No diatribes on fossil fuels, please. This is just an example of the psychological 9 taken to one more level.)
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