I gotta admit. I was / am always amazed that they are as accurate as they are.
Like outside of a couple products I probabbly can't tell you what most groceries or consumer products cost. There's just so many to keep track of, and that's saying something as I shop / cook a great deal.
I seriously would dramatically under or overbid on a can of soup.
(Wasn't able to read the article through the paywall) Does Price is Right use MSRP or what? Because I'll usually just look at my options and choose my lowest one - I have no idea what I should be paying for something.
For most paywall sites like this, you can also get the full content by being quick on the 'escape' key after reloading. If you can interrupt it after the static article content loads but before most of the javascript loads then the bottom paragraphs won't get chopped off.
I do the same thing. The shopping list says "milk", I look at the options on the shelf and select a suitable one. Price is likely a parameter, but since it's just a local decision I've more or less forgotten the actual numbers a minute later.
I suppose I would notice if the price was suddenly $5 for something that usually costs $1, but for many items I'm not even sure I would.
This is true, but a lot of people here would be great at "the FLOPS are right" or "the read latency is right" (incredibly boring show), while most also determined either consciously or not that recalling the price of consumer products wasn't that worthwhile.
Going with their mentioned larger number of products but also throw out that manufacturers are good at creating similar products that have minor differences to benefit certain large retailers; some of which could use this to avoid price matching. throw in confusion between MSRP and actual pricing and not knowing which price they use would add to the confusion
Technology may play a role. Reaching for a smartphone is easier than recalling a fact from memory. Who remembers phone numbers anymore?
I wouldn't guess that memory is the issue so much as less exposure to this type of information in the first place. We no longer aimlessly browse stores checking everything out; now we just search for specific items, buy them, and move on.
I can probably recall the prices of things I've actually purchased about as well as past generations, but anything beyond that is basically a wild guess.
As someone who's been keto for just about my entire adult life, the humor of "I mean it's one banana Michael. What could it cost, $10?"[1] was almost lost on me.
My wife didn't remember my number until I drilled her on it a bunch a couple years ago (and was surprised to learn that I had committed hers to memory).
Now if she ever gets her phone stolen she doesn't need to find a public library or borrow a laptop to contact me
less exposure to this type of information in the first place
Or perhaps just as significantly: this information is now constantly in flux. No longer are prices set by hand. Everything (at Amazon and Walmart, at least) is priced by computers that are constantly trying to determine the ideal price that maximize profits. So who could “know” the price of anything if the number is always changing?
Moreover, the price of a things seems less determined by the cost to manufacture + some markup, supply/demand, or even a general sense of value.
Store brand vs name brand being a reasonable example. The exact same product with two different names on it - two different prices by pretty wide margins in some cases. Heck even the same can of (product) at two different stores can very by quite a bit.
The cost of a piece of tech a wild from one to another while the guts are basically the same. Then consider that the physical item is being sold at-cost or close to it, but real revenue for the company is based on subscriptions or data + ads.
How could anyone look at a kitchen appliance and guess what the price is today? It seems every toaster is made in the same factory, slap a different brand sticker on it, enable an extra button (or disable it on a generic version), and boom that $20 toaster is $150.
Also, everything is always on sale. MSRP is a seemingly meaningless number in the face of endless rolling sales.
a brand isn’t meaningless, tho. the brand defines the entity that a relationship is with. for example, a name brand toaster is safer because there’s a company that manages safety recalls.
>Everything (at Amazon and Walmart, at least) is priced by computers that are constantly trying to determine the ideal price that maximize profits.
Do you have a source on this available? I ask due to some second hand retail experience with Wal-Mart specifically, that their pricing contracts lean heavily on pre-determined price points (under $20, etc).
I agree. I can recall the historical prices of staple groceries almost immediately, because I buy them every week and base my dinners around what is on sale.
When it comes to durable goods, I have no clue anymore. Put a 65" TV and I'd bomb it...somewhere between $400 and $1500?
Yep, and in my case since I buy groceries on Amazon and don't purchase foods that don't fit my macros, I'd have an even harder time. e.g. I couldn't tell you offhand with certainty how much bread or any particular brand of cereal costs.
My wife and I regularly watch The Price is Right, and I'm frequently amazes at how broad the spectrum is for prices of televisions. That set includes outdoor televisions at $3k+
> Put a 65" TV and I'd bomb it...somewhere between $400 and $1500?
that's actually not bad. I researched TVs recently, and an entry level 65" does cost about $400, while $1500 is upper mid-range. of course, it can be double that or more for a really good 65" oled.
if I had to price a specific model, I'd be in trouble.
Both! I see anywhere from $549 to $2200 on Amazon right now.
Durable items introduce enough randomness into games like The Price is Right, but laziness on the part of the producers (e.g. using the same 65" TV every show) negates it. Keen players that study for the show used to know what a Ford Escort cost as well as every add-on package. Then they would ask the host which packages are installed.
My wife and I watch Price is Right... our favorites when they describe the car is the paint and fabric protection. Also, a few weeks ago, they had one of the Canam trikes - it had reverse!
That depends on the tech. An egg's an egg, but you can get anyhing from 2012's top-of-the-line 65" for $400-$500, to an 8K OLED with a subwoofer built into the back or an attached sound bar or whatever for 5 figures.
Another piece of the puzzle is they describe consumer electronics in very generic terms. So the real answer is "it depends". A while back I saw an iMac on the show. I had been looking at that exact model and new all the various price points it could be, but they didn't give enough information to narrow it down at all. It was just "an Apple computer" and then the detailed description labled it "an iMac".
Price is right products are paid placements that link into existing advertising campaigns. It wasn't random trivia -- the folks who watched the show and signed up to play the game watched TV! People knew what a 1986 Ford Festiva cost because... they saw the ads on TV. There was a sort of democracy of experience where we all saw the same ads.
Now, advertising is hyper-focused. I don't see ads for a set of pots and pans. I get ads for baseball gloves and Yubikey. My father in law gets ads for conservative political nonsense.
My mother-in-law gave both of her kids these mop things that she was really excited about, and she was surprised when we didn't understand what the big deal was. Turns out she had been seeing ads for them on Facebook for months, and assumed we had two. It was a very enlightening experience for all of us: she got an introduction to targeted advertising, and we realized that not everyone understands how today's advertising market works.
I realized last week that I've gotten so used to not checking prices that I put a $70 bottle of melatonin in my amazon shopping cart without noticing. This particular brand is a regular purchase for me and it's always been about $7, so I didn't consider even looking at the price.
I'm sure that that's the goal as far as the seller is concerned - hope that buyers don't notice and purchase it. Yet another amazon scam
I find it's a general problem with "household" goods on Amazon--and one reason the Dash buttons were mostly ill-conceived. You can get prices that are Walmart-competitive (which is basically my benchmark for paper towels and the like). But it varies all over the map and you absolutely have to pay attention. Which, in my case with a Walmart nearby, means that it's not worth the trouble.
I think even more so when it's something you've bought before. "Alexa, buy more XYZ". I don't use assistants either (for I suspect the same reasons as you), but I assume Alexa would simply repurchase the same item you bought last time, regardless of price. In OP's case, that'd be a 10x markup.
I would never buy supplements off Amazon - if they're trying to get you to accidentally buy melatonin for 10x the regular price, then they're probably also trying to get you to buy counterfeit melatonin for 1x the regular price.
No, and that's a good point. I've lost a lot of faith in Amazon since it turned out that their Apple chargers were counterfeit (or were actually Apple but from a different country with different safety standards, or something).
I've definitely gotten counterfeit Advantage flea medication from Amazon. A) It didn't work, and B) the cats had no reaction to applying it (usually they hate it because it burns a little on the skin). Packaging was about perfect, and the applicators were filled with water. Now I only buy it from the local pet store, where I can make the safe assumption they're sourcing the stuff responsibly.
I probably have a pretty good idea generally of what things cost even though I don't really watch broadcast television. But I don't disagree with the basic point. All the Facebook employees getting the VPN endpoint blacklisted because they're all ordering from DoorDash because they don't have food at home and don't cook... I'm sure many of them have no idea what a dozen eggs cost and why should they?
This actually became a minor issue in a 1992 presidential debate [1] when GHW Bush had no idea what a gallon of milk cost. But, again, why would he?
ADDED: Eggs are probably not the best example because if you ever eat eggs at a diner or whatever, that sort of gives you an upper bound on the cost. But pick random staples like flour and it gets harder to reason about the cost.
>Eggs are probably not the best example because if you ever eat eggs at a diner or whatever, that sort of gives you an upper bound on the cost
I don't know, I think eggs actually work well. The price of eggs can vary pretty wildly. One store near me sells eggs starting at $3.99 for half a dozen white ones, up to like $8.99 for a dozen free range organic ones and a bunch of prices in between for various quality eggs. Another store sells them starting at like $2.50 for a half dozen white ones and up to $5.99 for the free range organic ones, with all the prices in between being different to the first store. Then, there's the eggs you can buy at the weekly farmer's market, and near daily craft and other fairs where the prices vary drastically from one person's eggs to another. There's also at least 10 or more places between most of the communities here where people sell eggs from their home.
Diner eggs can vary pretty wildly in price too. You can get some pretty high quality eggs from cheap places and some really lousy expensive powdered scrambled eggs. You have no real idea the actual value to cost with diner eggs.
Those do seem high though $0.10 seems a bit low. I think a dozen store-brand large eggs are around $2 where I live. (White are a bit cheaper than brown.)
Aldi and Walmart eggs will sometimes be under a dollar. They seem to compete on staple goods like eggs and milk to get customers in and buying higher margin products.
It's not just that—the prices on The Price Is Right are MSRP. Even if you can remember the price you paid for that exact box of macaroni and cheese at the store, chances are, you didn't pay MSRP.
These days, more and more stores have (often fairly arbitrary) discounts, which wasn't the case when TPIR was in its early heyday.
Yep, the rise of white-label products, discount stores, and the increase in selection have really changed this. Retail has wildly changed in the US in the past 30 years.
When I was a kid, Kraft Mac and Cheese was basically the only product of its type on the shelf. Now, I can count on basically any grocery store having a dozen or more varieties of the same thing.
True, but most stores continue to show MSRP right next to the sale price, since it helps motivate customers to make a purchase knowing they are getting it for less.
Maybe they are less piece conscious than before. There seem to be less coupon cutting with data analytics applying constant sales to attract buyers. Prices are skewed this way.
For me, the prices can vary widely depending on what store you shop at. A can of Classico spaghetti sauce at my local store is $3.50. But the same can, volume, and flavor on Amazon is $1.99.
I'd say it's more indicative of the randomness of contestant inclusion than anything else. Are the rates of "regular watcher" contestants decreasing? Have the producers changed the type of contestant they decide to include?
To be truly effective at these games, you needed to be watching what the accepted show price of items were...you never could assume your local store price or dealership price.
Maybe technology is to blame but in a different way. Its well accepted now that a person will be offered two different prices for a product or service depending on a wide number of factors.
Included but not limited to: New/repeat customer, country of connection, device used to connect, previous purchasing or even searching habits.
You can test this in the UK by searching for a holiday. Do it once on an android phone using your normal account and then do it again via a macbook as a guest of the site.
The article was behind a paywall, but in the past few years, the show has been getting away from staple goods to make it more difficult for contestants to win.
The Perfect Bid (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdFKZtZop7A) went over this in more detail after a player and long time watcher (Ted Slauson) managed to win both showcases. For years, the show had used a set of household goods that had a consistent price. Ted memorized all of the prices and won both showcases at the end.
The producer freaked out over the incident and started to use more items and ones that add-ons that made guessing the price more difficult. They did that because they didn't want their winnings budget blown out.
In recent years, they have been using more generic items like 'free utilities for a year' to make it more random.
I noticed that it actually flashes the full content for one second before loading the paywall. If I quickly pressed the "reader view" button in my browser I could read the whole article without the paywall.
I shop for my family's groceries every week, and I couldn't tell you the price of 3/4 of what I buy. I just know what a usual weekly total looks like. If there's significant change I can usually tie it to one or two items that were special that week (or that great sale that I chose to bulk up on). I tend to just put things into buckets of $1-20, $20-100, $100-250, etc. Most things at the grocery store are in that first bucket, so while I'll grab an alternate if there's a sale on, the only prices I really pay attention to are steak/large cuts of meat.
Absolutely. Whenever I see ads on social media for yet another dropshipping store I can instantly guess how much they are paying for the product when they order it from China.
It's actually a rough indication of your wealth; there was an article the other day that categorized people by wealth based on what purchases they don't really have to think about (can't find it in quick order). Not having to nitpick about common groceries puts you comfortably in the middle class; the next step would be the ability to just go on vacation several times a year without really worrying about it. Then it's stuff like cars and big purchases like that, then houses, then idk, yachts? Elections? Countries?
For me, The Economist is the prime example of the Murray Gell-Mann amnesia effect. They are so off on topics I happen to know about. And yet I feel like I can trust them with whatever wacky eye-catching theory they conjure.
"Terry Kniess studied prices. He saw that virtually every prize on The Price Is Right, from a pack of gum to the flashiest car, repeated. He and Linda memorized their values the way Terry had learned to count cards. When they felt they were ready, they made their way to California.... "Actual retail price, $23,743," Carey said. "You got it right on the nose. You win both Showcases.""
"The producers no longer rely on Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup; now they have different soups. They have different everything. They've built more luck into the games, dumb luck, and they've started doing sneaky things like changing the options on the cars — adding floor mats, taking away the stereo system — to mess with the prices. And they've started adding more luxury items, like Burberry coats, the sorts of things for which ordinary people who have lived their ordinary lives would never have clipped a coupon."
Though I don't vouch for how accurate that's going to be after the changes.
Based on what I could read of the article, and what other people are saying in response, I suspect the article is basically ruined by the fact that it was deliberately made harder. Of course after it was deliberately made harder, people did worse. There's not a lot of conclusions to be drawn from that data point, even trendy ones like "addiction to cell phones", which may ruin 90% of the people's memories but another fraction may be using their cell phones to run SRS programs to memorize everything. (You can waste a lot of time on cell phones, sure, but they can be powerfully turned to the light side if you take a bit of time to figure out how.)
In addition to other good comments here, "prices" don't exist as inherent attributes anymore. Everything is variably priced and has multiple discounts applied, so no one knows the meaningless "retail price" of what they buy. They just see what the offer is on the day they shop.
TPIR is a very US show. In most of the world, especially going back to when the show began, the idea of a product having "a" price is laughably absurd. Everything is haggled over.
Confusopoly (aka Dilbert's confusopoly) is confusing marketing designed to prevent the buyer making informed decisions.
(...)
The term has been adopted by economists. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Richard Cordray, championing meaningful regulation for the financial industry, used the term confusopoly to refer to large financial institutions (Cordray 2014, 4'04"-4'26") :
"There's actually an economic term for this; it's called "Confusopoly." If [the sellers] can confuse the consumer enough then the consumers won't necessary know what choice they're making and they can be talked into just about anything."
— Richard Cordray, 2014/01/08
I love this concept. This perfectly describes the state of pretty much all consumer markets today, and one of the biggest pitfalls of free-market capitalism. Also, it feeds in to my always-shouted-down argument that advertising/marketing is generally a counter-productive economic broken window (not counter-productive for a given business, but counter-productive as a whole).
Information Asymmetry is the more generic term for this situation. One person has the info, and the other doesn't -- and can benefit from keeping it that way, e.g. insider stock trading, estate sales, even garage sales where you know what their old junk is really worth.
The prices of things fluctuate so much. The price of the same product in different stores or the same product in the same store on different days can vary wildly. How many things these days have fixed prices? Iphones? Teslas? Mail order mattresses?
88 comments
[ 108 ms ] story [ 2363 ms ] threadLike outside of a couple products I probabbly can't tell you what most groceries or consumer products cost. There's just so many to keep track of, and that's saying something as I shop / cook a great deal.
I seriously would dramatically under or overbid on a can of soup.
Try turning off javascript.
I suppose I would notice if the price was suddenly $5 for something that usually costs $1, but for many items I'm not even sure I would.
I heard the ending is worth it, though.
I wouldn't guess that memory is the issue so much as less exposure to this type of information in the first place. We no longer aimlessly browse stores checking everything out; now we just search for specific items, buy them, and move on.
I can probably recall the prices of things I've actually purchased about as well as past generations, but anything beyond that is basically a wild guess.
As someone who's been keto for just about my entire adult life, the humor of "I mean it's one banana Michael. What could it cost, $10?"[1] was almost lost on me.
1: https://youtu.be/Nl_Qyk9DSUw
I do.. Most of those I remember are from the 80s and 90s though :D
But I do remember the phone number of my closest family still. I also remember my bank account numbers which is something many find strange!
So do I. Weird. The thing is, I have trouble remembering my own cell number, because I never dial it.
Now if she ever gets her phone stolen she doesn't need to find a public library or borrow a laptop to contact me
Or perhaps just as significantly: this information is now constantly in flux. No longer are prices set by hand. Everything (at Amazon and Walmart, at least) is priced by computers that are constantly trying to determine the ideal price that maximize profits. So who could “know” the price of anything if the number is always changing?
Store brand vs name brand being a reasonable example. The exact same product with two different names on it - two different prices by pretty wide margins in some cases. Heck even the same can of (product) at two different stores can very by quite a bit.
The cost of a piece of tech a wild from one to another while the guts are basically the same. Then consider that the physical item is being sold at-cost or close to it, but real revenue for the company is based on subscriptions or data + ads.
How could anyone look at a kitchen appliance and guess what the price is today? It seems every toaster is made in the same factory, slap a different brand sticker on it, enable an extra button (or disable it on a generic version), and boom that $20 toaster is $150.
Also, everything is always on sale. MSRP is a seemingly meaningless number in the face of endless rolling sales.
Do you have a source on this available? I ask due to some second hand retail experience with Wal-Mart specifically, that their pricing contracts lean heavily on pre-determined price points (under $20, etc).
When it comes to durable goods, I have no clue anymore. Put a 65" TV and I'd bomb it...somewhere between $400 and $1500?
that's actually not bad. I researched TVs recently, and an entry level 65" does cost about $400, while $1500 is upper mid-range. of course, it can be double that or more for a really good 65" oled.
if I had to price a specific model, I'd be in trouble.
Both! I see anywhere from $549 to $2200 on Amazon right now.
Durable items introduce enough randomness into games like The Price is Right, but laziness on the part of the producers (e.g. using the same 65" TV every show) negates it. Keen players that study for the show used to know what a Ford Escort cost as well as every add-on package. Then they would ask the host which packages are installed.
Price is right products are paid placements that link into existing advertising campaigns. It wasn't random trivia -- the folks who watched the show and signed up to play the game watched TV! People knew what a 1986 Ford Festiva cost because... they saw the ads on TV. There was a sort of democracy of experience where we all saw the same ads.
Now, advertising is hyper-focused. I don't see ads for a set of pots and pans. I get ads for baseball gloves and Yubikey. My father in law gets ads for conservative political nonsense.
I'm sure that that's the goal as far as the seller is concerned - hope that buyers don't notice and purchase it. Yet another amazon scam
I don't have any of these assistants in my house for obvious reasons but this seems like the perfect way to scam someone.
This actually became a minor issue in a 1992 presidential debate [1] when GHW Bush had no idea what a gallon of milk cost. But, again, why would he?
ADDED: Eggs are probably not the best example because if you ever eat eggs at a diner or whatever, that sort of gives you an upper bound on the cost. But pick random staples like flour and it gets harder to reason about the cost.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17826509
I don't know, I think eggs actually work well. The price of eggs can vary pretty wildly. One store near me sells eggs starting at $3.99 for half a dozen white ones, up to like $8.99 for a dozen free range organic ones and a bunch of prices in between for various quality eggs. Another store sells them starting at like $2.50 for a half dozen white ones and up to $5.99 for the free range organic ones, with all the prices in between being different to the first store. Then, there's the eggs you can buy at the weekly farmer's market, and near daily craft and other fairs where the prices vary drastically from one person's eggs to another. There's also at least 10 or more places between most of the communities here where people sell eggs from their home.
Diner eggs can vary pretty wildly in price too. You can get some pretty high quality eggs from cheap places and some really lousy expensive powdered scrambled eggs. You have no real idea the actual value to cost with diner eggs.
ETA: Prices are in Canadian dollars.
I am used to paying less than. 10 USD for an egg.
https://www.businessinsider.com/r-exclusive-wal-mart-launche...
These days, more and more stores have (often fairly arbitrary) discounts, which wasn't the case when TPIR was in its early heyday.
When I was a kid, Kraft Mac and Cheese was basically the only product of its type on the shelf. Now, I can count on basically any grocery store having a dozen or more varieties of the same thing.
https://carolynahyankee.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/mac-n-ch...
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/grocery-stores-carry-40000...
Seriously, don't trust Amazon with stuff you ingest. Not worth the danger.
To be truly effective at these games, you needed to be watching what the accepted show price of items were...you never could assume your local store price or dealership price.
Included but not limited to: New/repeat customer, country of connection, device used to connect, previous purchasing or even searching habits.
You can test this in the UK by searching for a holiday. Do it once on an android phone using your normal account and then do it again via a macbook as a guest of the site.
The Perfect Bid (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdFKZtZop7A) went over this in more detail after a player and long time watcher (Ted Slauson) managed to win both showcases. For years, the show had used a set of household goods that had a consistent price. Ted memorized all of the prices and won both showcases at the end.
The producer freaked out over the incident and started to use more items and ones that add-ons that made guessing the price more difficult. They did that because they didn't want their winnings budget blown out. In recent years, they have been using more generic items like 'free utilities for a year' to make it more random.
/ hacker skillz /
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/27/633164558/slack-flickr-stewar...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-30/everyone-...
This podcast episode is about the history of The Economist. It’s really interesting:
https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-98-the-refined-so...
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a7922/price-is-right-p... :
"Terry Kniess studied prices. He saw that virtually every prize on The Price Is Right, from a pack of gum to the flashiest car, repeated. He and Linda memorized their values the way Terry had learned to count cards. When they felt they were ready, they made their way to California.... "Actual retail price, $23,743," Carey said. "You got it right on the nose. You win both Showcases.""
"The producers no longer rely on Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup; now they have different soups. They have different everything. They've built more luck into the games, dumb luck, and they've started doing sneaky things like changing the options on the cars — adding floor mats, taking away the stereo system — to mess with the prices. And they've started adding more luxury items, like Burberry coats, the sorts of things for which ordinary people who have lived their ordinary lives would never have clipped a coupon."
You can study for the Price is Right right now: https://quizlet.com/218097429/the-price-is-right-study-guide...
Though I don't vouch for how accurate that's going to be after the changes.
Based on what I could read of the article, and what other people are saying in response, I suspect the article is basically ruined by the fact that it was deliberately made harder. Of course after it was deliberately made harder, people did worse. There's not a lot of conclusions to be drawn from that data point, even trendy ones like "addiction to cell phones", which may ruin 90% of the people's memories but another fraction may be using their cell phones to run SRS programs to memorize everything. (You can waste a lot of time on cell phones, sure, but they can be powerfully turned to the light side if you take a bit of time to figure out how.)
TPIR is a very US show. In most of the world, especially going back to when the show began, the idea of a product having "a" price is laughably absurd. Everything is haggled over.
Confusopoly (aka Dilbert's confusopoly) is confusing marketing designed to prevent the buyer making informed decisions.
(...) The term has been adopted by economists. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Richard Cordray, championing meaningful regulation for the financial industry, used the term confusopoly to refer to large financial institutions (Cordray 2014, 4'04"-4'26") :
"There's actually an economic term for this; it's called "Confusopoly." If [the sellers] can confuse the consumer enough then the consumers won't necessary know what choice they're making and they can be talked into just about anything." — Richard Cordray, 2014/01/08
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20577142
Advertising is cancer on society. Very thoughtful points.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry
and from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15986984