In a field experiment, researchers priced the same product two ways. At $34, it sold okay. At $39 — five dollars more — it outsold the cheaper price by 24%.
Read that again. The higher price won by a mile.
Why? Your brain does not do math at the shelf. It reads left to right and rounds down. $39 lands in the “thirty-something” bucket, and years of conditioning have taught us that a 9 at the end means a deal. The researchers who ran the test — Anderson and Simester, published and peer-reviewed — found the $39 price beat the cheaper $34 by 24%.
Others found the same pattern: prices ending in 99 outsell round prices by about 8%.
Nobody is immune to this. Not you, not me. We all walk past the math and buy the feeling.
So the next time you price something, remember: the customer is not calculating. They are glancing. Price for the glance.