Hello everyone. You are here to learn some
fact in 3 mins. Yesterday, I went to my friends’
home to play video games with him. When I
was on the street, the weather was so hot
that I sweat a lot. I can’t help and went
to a convenience store for a bottle of cold
drink. In front of me, there are two soft
drinks, a $9.99 Cola and a $10 Pepsi. Which
one will you choose? I believe you have already
come across difference price tricks before
and you may even be able to name more cases
of these. However, do you know why these price
tricks are so effective? Why our brain will
fall on these thinking trap?
The first reason is that our brain has filtered
out the $0.99 cents. When we are shopping,
probably there are many products for us to
choose. With that said, there should be many
price tags on the shelf that we have to compare
with. If we read the details one by one, it
may take us a long time to finish comparing
the prices, so our brain chooses a faster
way by automatically filtering out unimportant
information. Normally, we don’t think $0.01
is important to us. So when we are reading
the price tags, we only read the number before
the decimal point, in case you forget everything
about math, that means the dot in the price.
Therefore, when I was buying the soft drinks,
what in my mind is just $10 and $9 dollars.
Despite the fact that it is just $0.01 difference
in math, the price difference is exaggerated
mentally to $1 in our mind. Our fault perception
has made us think that Pepsi is much more
expensive.
Besides this little price trick on decimal
numbers, there’s another price trick using
the ending number 9. When we are buying something
more expensive like $300, when we compare
it to another product that is $299, we sometime
will misperceive that the later one is much
cheaper. The reason is that our brain has
adapted to read from left to right. Look at
the subtitles or whatever text around you.
We have been writing and reading things from
left to right since we are born. With such
a habit, when we read the $299 price tag,
the first thing comes to us is 2. While for
the $300 product, the first thing comes is
3. So when we are comparing the price really
quickly, we will misbelieve that the two products
are $200 and $300 instead. A dollar may not
be significant to you, but a hundred should
mean a lot, unless you are so rich. But if
you are that rich, I think price trick doesn’t
work on you because you won’t even read
the price.
Anyway, you have now learned why the two price
tricks are so useful to make us misestimate
the price difference. Think twice before you
buy something next time and see if you get
faked by the magic number 9 again. Subscribe
the channel and you can always learn something
new in 3 mins. This is 3 mins Fact. Thank
you for watching.
