Decoy Pricing at Safeway

Recently, I've been reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, an excellent book about times our decision-making fails us. One is decoy pricing. This is when someone selling you something presents you with something that is out of your price range, and then shows you something in your price range. For example, a television salesman shows you a TV that's $1,500, followed by one that's $850. The idea is to get you to think, "TV No. 2 is $650 less; what a deal!" Really, you ought to be thinking: "Is TV No. 2 really worth a week's pay?" or you ought to be thinking, "Is this the best deal in town for TV No. 2?"

The same thing applies to stores where you get to see the "regular" price, followed by the "sale," to make you feel good about how you don't have to pay the artificially high "regular." Today, I went grocery shopping at Safeway, where about half of the products have two price tags on them. Only at Safeway, they don't just clutter your eyes with irrelevant information, they force you to get a %$@! card to participate in their stupid decoy pricing scheme. Yes, you have to apply for the right to have your mind messed with.

I find this all rather exhausting. I think next time I am going to fall asleep in the bread section to recharge. If they ask me to explain this behavior, I'll tell them that I was thinking of taking a 30-minute nap, but if they stop this decoy pricing card nonsense, I'll reduce my nap to 20 minutes. They could save 10 minutes of a huge guy behaving weirdly in their store and frightening their other customers. What a deal!