And 99 Cents

I'm really getting tired of this "99 cents" crap. Yes, I realize that it's been around for a very long time, but I'm officially fed up with it.

Originally, advertisers would price things one penny less than what they were supposed to, in an effort to make things seem cheaper than they actually are. When the practice first started, I imagine it probably worked reasonably well. People would see $9.99 and not realize that it's almost exactly the same as ten dollars. It's weird, psychological crap that I don't really have an interest in.

But at this point, does it really fool anybody anymore? We all know this trick by now. When you see "$3.99", you think "that's four dollars", not "that's three dollars and ninety-nine cents". So can we please do away with this? It's annoying as hell to have to use pennies and everything just to make the change work. Of course, we'd still have to deal with sales tax, but there's a way around that too.

For the love of God, if we're going to have sales tax, how but just make it so that every price will end in a zero once you add it up? Wouldn't that be wonderful? A world without having to dick around with pennies. I've heard that several other countries already do this. We need to get on that bandwagon. Now.