Sometimes shops use the low order bits to encode metadata, e.g. “this is the 20% off price” or “this is ineligible for the sale (discount) going on now”.

Thus $15.20 vs $15.40

I was at a craft fair in Tennessee once long ago. People were selling hand-turned bowls, fountain pens, textiles, pottery, etc. There was one seller whose products were quite different: bowls and things roughly hewn out of wood with the bark on and such. I think he styled himself as, and perhaps was, an Appalachian mountain man from eastern Tennessee (this was in Nashville, which is a bit like Las Vegas). I wasn't in the market for what he was selling, or really anything, but another oddity of his goods was the precision of their prices: $41.13 or $15.02 and so forth. Everything else had a price that ended in 0, 5, or 9, and generally it was a number of dollars with no cents, maybe just two significant digits. This gave me the impression he had very exact knowledge of his own costs and profit margin but very little sense of the pricing customs of craft fairs, or really pricing in general. Anyway, this is just an anecdote. His pricing didn't seem to be making him more prosperous, but he is one of the few things I remember from that day.

Maybe the prices were calculated to make post-sales-tax amounts round numbers? That's been the case when I've seen weirdly precise store pricing in the past.

In 1985 I visited the Pergamon Museum in East Berlin. The price for a pot of coffee in the cafeteria was something like DDM 2.67.

Isnt' DDM 2.67 just 1.00 in Ishtar Crowns? I'm sure they were just trying to maintain consistency across the museum.

It's a great museum by the way.

Some retailers in Canada use the two penny/cent digits as a code. I.e. Something like.99 is regular price,.77 is manager's special,.88 is corporate sale.

This happens in the US as well from what I understand and I always found it an interesting testament to margin size of the product when you're selling something at a mass scald and can afford shaving 10 or 20 cents off the product price point, overloading the value to codify it internally.

Seems like there are cheaper ways, but maybe the price cuts back on secondary labeling or sell association, ultimately saveing personnel time, which ultimately costs less than those expenses.

Sam Walton hated .99 for some reason, so Walmart prices are never that.

ASDA (subsidiary of Wal-Mart) fuel stations in the UK always have the fuel price ending in .8 (e.g. 175.8p per litre) while pretty much EVERY other fuel station always has prices ending in .9.

It gives a feeling that they're slightly cheaper than the competition, I think. Even if the more significant digit is more expensive sometimes, people don't remember that part as much because it varies from day to day.

...until someone else comes along and offers .7 : ) so the race to the bottom begins

And, once the race to the bottom reaches .0, the petrol station operator that stuck to .9 is back in the lead, again regardless of the significant digits! It would be a bit of a retail version of the Shepard tone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone

It’s not a race to the bottom because what Asda is doing is pricing it 175.8 when others price it 174.9

I assumed they meant a race to the bottom in terms of decimal digits only. Another petrol station could price it at 175.7, or maybe even 176.7 if the illusion of being cheaper than ASDA still works.

Asda in Arbroath was .7 when I went past the other day.

The problem at the moment is that '175'... I don't think people bother too much about .8 vs .9

Well, maybe because it's one of the lowest forms of making stuff look cheaper

I'd wish Apple cut the crap on that, it makes them look like you're buying stuff from a used car lot.

Which is strange because you’d think the $1000 would make it look like a higher class item.

You’ll never see decimals in a fancy restaurant for example.

That may have been true at one time but nowadays there is a lot of .99 in Walmart.