Keeping it Odd
I once worked for a company that owned gasoline stations. I had never noticed before, but the price of gasoline is priced with odd numbers. You would never price gasoline at $4.24. I remember my boss saying, “That’s a rookie,” when we would go around once a week to see what the competition was pricing their gas, and somebody had even used pricing. It turns out that even pricing is a last gas like gasp resort, and you only use it if gas gets so expensive that hardly anybody can afford it anymore. That’s when you will utilize even pricing. Or, if you run out of numbers.
Even so, not only is odd pricing the way to go if you look real close at the price of gas on the sign and on the gas pumps, it will be $4.25 99. That’s four dollars twenty-five cents and 99 hundredths of a cent.
When people sell other things, they also price oddly and as close as they can to the next dollar. For instance, “Hurry! Don’t miss out! This is the last time we will price this item at $19.99. Another penny and it will be $20.” So, $20 is larger than $19.99. If you are moving fast, your whole being will lean into 19 faster than it’s going to lean into 20.
If I were going to speak of the population of a town, I would want it to be 927 sooner than I’d want it to be 930. It’s like Mount Everest. Who would believe that Mount Everest is actually, exactly 29,032 feet tall? It really is. Exactly. Don’t believe me? Look it up.
Did you know that when somebody says a shopkeeper has their thumb on the scales, that means they actually put their thumb on the scale. “I would like to buy 2 pounds of apples.” The apples cost $1.00 a pound. The shopkeeper loads six apples on the scale. For argument’s sake, let’s say these particular apples weigh in at .33 oz per apple. That means six of them are going to weigh in at 1.98 pounds. Is the shopkeeper going to do that math and figure out that if you want to buy these six apples, you will pay $3.96? No. They will tip that scale and say you need to pay $4.00. Will they get away with it? Probably. If they follow the practice of odd pricing, they will charge you $4.01. Do that ten times during the day and they’ve cleared an awesome 50¢ for the day. Do that every day for a year and they’ve padded their coffers by $182.50. All for keeping their thumb on the scale.
Makes you think, doesn’t it?
Now, what would you do with an employee who habitually tends to lean on things? What if you were to lean against a wall three times during the course of a day? Maybe you only leaned for a couple of minutes. Well, that’s six minutes each workday. That’s 30 minutes each work week. That’s 2,080 minutes every year. If the employee makes $25 an hour, then that has cost the employer $866.75 in a year. Yikes. Two minutes a day. Leaning. My boss with the gasoline stations had us print up signs that said, “If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.”
Another thing with keeping it odd would be if you were to always ensure that whatever you wrote during the day ended up being an odd number. Like, instead of publishing four stories, you would push yourself to publish five stories. This morning I’ve already finished writing three stories. That’s not enough for the day, especially as it’s just 20 minutes past noon. I’ve got the whole afternoon to write. So, finish up this piece and write another one. That will give me five stories today. If I kept that up in the next month, I could publish 150 pieces. It’s mind-boggling. I’d need to find another platform to write on, or just cave and start writing on a book.
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