Since this is in the mildly infuriating community, you view this as infuriating, but I think this is preying on the psychology of the average person who doesn’t think about things as much.
They just breeze by this and don’t look closely, but they get the vague impression that the store is saving them a bunch of money, so they’ll be more likely to continue shopping there.
Kinda in the same vein as charging full price and showing the discount separately on the invoice or receipt. People need to see that the seller saved them money or they made a wise choice to save themselves money.
Since this is in the mildly infuriating community, you view this as infuriating, but I think this is preying on the psychology of the average person who doesn’t think about things as much.
They just breeze by this and don’t look closely, but they get the vague impression that the store is saving them a bunch of money, so they’ll be more likely to continue shopping there.
Kinda in the same vein as charging full price and showing the discount separately on the invoice or receipt. People need to see that the seller saved them money or they made a wise choice to save themselves money.
There’s also something called the decoy effect, talked about a bit in this entertaining TED Talk.