The “and 99 pence” thing has always annoyed me, chiefly because it shows that the average person is an idiot, to be able to be taken in by such a simple ruse. Which is why I was quite pleased when I learnt that Australians, with their lowest denomination coin being a 5c piece, had essentially done away with all that - till receipts will often show a “rounding” adjustment to shift it to the nearest 5 cents.
Now, I can understand remnants of the 99c practice still hanging around, where you're not paying a fixed price but a rate, e.g. $7.99 per kilo of bananas (I wish – it's currently $12.49, and $7.99'd still be more expensive than the UK!) or 3.4c per minute for phone calls.
What annoys the hell out of me, even more so than the original 99c practice itself, is that there are still any number of individual items that are priced to end in 99c. I bought a phone on Sunday for $49.99. Plus a cent. Why? The 99c practice is disingenuous enough because it's playing on people's psychology and the way we write our numbers. This is going one further – it's giving an item a price which people cannot possibly pay! (Unless they buy 5 things all of which end in a 99. Imagine that as a special offer - "Buy any 5 items and save ... erm, well, 0c really, but if you bought them all separately you'd pay 5c more!")
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in holland they used to have the same thing but they did't price individual items in denominations of less than 5c. Generally they were sensible enough to just price things to the guilder.
Now they're on euros and things are 99c...
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