What if we told you that the reason Office Depot prices its staplers at $10.03 — instead of an even $10 — is NOT just to mess with your head?
In fact, that seemingly random extra 3¢ secretly tells you that the stapler has been marked down 3 times AND that it will likely be marked down once more before disappearing from the shelves…
It’s true. But that 3¢ is just the tip of the iceberg.
You don’t have to be a member of the retail-luminati to benefit from this secret info — you just need to know the codes.
Most large department retailers — Home Depot, Target, Old Navy — build secret, unpublicized codes into the prices of the products to reveal information about how they’ve been discounted.
A blog called “Rather Be Shopping” maintains a running list of these open secrets. At Best Buy, for example, a price ending in:
Other retailers have similar codes: At Home Depot, prices ending in $X.06 are on sale but will drop further in 6 weeks, while prices ending in $X.03 are marked down fully and will disappear forever in 3 weeks.
There are some more general takeaways for shoppers, too: Prices that end in 9 are generally bad deals (full price), while prices that end in 7 are generally good deals (marked down price).
The code’s meant to be cracked — and once it is, it creates loyal, engaged customers.
According to the Harvard Business Review, the secret menu at In-N-Out is one of the main drivers of the famous burger chain’s long-term financial success.
These “price vocabularies” are the secret menus of big retailers — they engage shoppers by letting them in on a “secret” and create loyalty among the frequent shoppers (who matter most to large retailers) by making them feel like they’re in the club.