Why do gas stations still put 0.9 cents on a gallon of gas?
Q: What on earth is the rationale for gas stations to list
their prices to include 0.9 cents at the end? When gas was 29 cents a
gallon (I remember paying 19.9 in Texas in 1968) the fractional cent
might have made sense. Now it doesn't, so why keep implying that $2.39.9
a gallon is not essentially the same as $2.40?
— M.W., Glen Ellyn
A: That fraction of a penny goes back a lot further than 1968. Try
1918 or thereabouts, when a penny went a lot further, too. Around the
time of the Great Depression, the federal government tacked a 1.5 cents
per gallon tax on the stuff. Since times were already tough enough,
gasoline retailers used the tried-and-true marketing trick of using the
0.9 instead of whole cents and it has been thus ever since.
(Yahoo.com)
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