#¢

Over the weekend I saw a video taken in a grocery store, with a display that showed some product on sale for 79¢. It made me smile!

One thing I miss from the past is the cent sign, ¢, which was common in grocery stores once upon a time. Can of soup? 35¢. That sort of thing. My childhood experience in the '80s and '90s reflects the tail end of an era where coins were an integral part of most people's day-to-day purchasing. In fact I even own a coin purse, because my dad (born in the 1930s) had one and regularly used it. From my perspective, it was just what you did.

We are living in a moment where social pressures are attempting to outmode large functional parts of the English language, with assaults on punctuation, capitalization, certain verb tenses, and a whole host of non-alphanumeric characters such as the humble cent sign. It's not on most keyboards so if you want to type it you either have to alt-code it or copy-paste it. Since most people can't even be bothered with basic grammar, that's just not going to happen. If someone does need to use cents, they'll either write the word "cents," or just express it in dollars, e.g. $0.85 instead of 85¢.

At the same time, inflation is pushing most product prices above the dollar mark, relegating cents more and more to the inconvenient decimal points on an integer dollar price, and making the cent sign even less relevant.

(Incidentally, this added complexity makes prices harder to think about and harder to compare to one another, ultimately making it subtly more difficult for people to be pennywise. If you've got a can of tomatoes for $2.29 and another for $2.86, it's harder to see just how significant of a price difference that is when compared to something like 40¢ versus 50¢, which is the same price difference when expressed as a ratio. 1.25:1, to be exact.)

It all adds up to the cent sign going extinct eventually. Sad face.

However!

I recently realized that there may be a glimmer of hope on the horizon for the beleaguered cent sign. We are in an era on the inflation graph where cents are especially non-relevant, but that may soon change as grocers and other retailers seek to present their product prices as being a bargain: Whereas, once upon a time, the cent size was commonly used to express the price of entire full-sized products, soon the era will be upon us where the cent sign can find a renaissance in expressing the price of individual quantities of things. Name-brand 12 oz. soda cans, for instance, when purchased in 12-packs, currently cost around 70¢ per can in the US. That's a great deal compared to restaurant prices, and is easier to look at than the 12-pack total price of $8 or $9. For another example, a very decent quality frank, when purchased in a pack of 6, works out to about 65¢ or so. And dirt-cheap franks might be more like 12¢.

You see where I'm going with this?

Inflation is especially hard to deal with conceptually when it gets into the 5 – 9 leading digit range or crosses over into requiring an extra digit. (Remember when gas was briefly threatening to hit $10 a gallon in some places a few years ago, and gas stations literally couldn't even display that price on their signboards?) It's very difficult to see something you're used to paying $4.00 for now costing $8.00. (Or $3.99 vs. $7.99 if you like.) In contrast, it's easier to deal with something once costing $1.50 now costing more like $3.00 ($2.99), even though the percentage increase is the same.

Laws (rightly) require product pricing to be honest on the official price tags, but there is nothing stopping retailers from using advertising displays highlighting the per-unit price. The per-unit / per-weight price is actually more valuable anyway on most products; I always make extensive use of it at WinCo and wherever else I go that includes such prices below the total price amount.

I was surprised we didn't see our Captains of Industry applying more of this revolutionary wit during the Egg Crisis. Even at the worst of it, eggs never got much past 75¢ per egg. 75¢ is a pretty palatable number considering how much utility a single egg offers. When you compare it to restaurant foods, or even prepared foods at the grocery store, the value proposition is clear.

Let's just hope that the arc of inflation will bring us again into that sublime era of the cent sign holding great daily value in people's lives!

^ _ ^