The Missing Decimal Point

 

Another weekend passed by and I had another set of interesting events and incidents.

I attended two sessions of NoVa Code Camp and both the session were extremes for my liking. While One was a slow and patient snail walk, the other was a roller-coaster ride without the safety belts on. Many interesting ideas presented just flew over my head before I could wrap my brain around it.

Was pleasantly surprised to see sparsely crowded temple, when we made it to the temple at an hour early than usual.

Learnt it the difficult way that Not all Costco’s have gas fuelling facilities, and It is best to avoid driving through Washington DC downtown on weekends even though the GPS shows a comparatively faster travel time.

When my Wifey read out the gas price to be 241 dollars, I immediately asked her to round it to the next cent up because of the 9 at the end. “Read that as 242 dollars coz its 241.9 where 9 is in superscript.”.

Strangely when she observed that people new to the country will misread that as “242” dollars instead of “2 dollars 42 cents” it makes me wonder who came up with this atrocious idea of dropping the decimal point.

I recollect now why my friend once filled up the car tank only to realize it later, it was the price of Milk ‘Gallon’ displayed prominently on the gas station board. Even I too had resisted from ordering wine at a local wine shop, when the labels on bottles showed 899.

I wonder how many people really correctly understand displayed price in any shop.

Think about this, Prices ending in .99 definitely have an edge than a rounded out price but the missing decimal point is can play tricks on the consumer. Time for a revamp.

What Say !?

:-)