David Gold grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, helping his parents run their general store.

They moved to L.A. when David was a teenager, and by his 30s, he was running the family's liquor store.

Gold noticed that whenever he posted a price, ending in 99 cents on a slow-moving wine, it's sold out.

He tested round number pricing, too, but that didn't work as well.

Prices ending in 99 cents brought the magic.

He thought, wouldn't it be fun to have a store where everything was 99 cents?

And so the 99-0.99-only store was born.

Egg hunting is a lot like deal hunting. So this Easter, 99 your basket.

You do the 99. So really, it's just another day at the 99.

Or better yet, I can 99 my birthday bash, right?

The store opened in 1982 with a line outside the door. Within two years, two more locations opened, and by 1991, there were two dozen.

The company never hired a publicity agent.

Instead, they relied on word of mouth and humor. They took puns on the number

99 to the max, with signs that read, open 9 to 9 days a week, or 99.99% satisfaction

or your money back.

Go 99ers. It wasn't a business model that could last forever.

The chain closed due to the pressures of inflation on their unchangeable prices.

But at one point, there were over 300 stores located in California, Texas, Arizona, and Nevada.

David Gold had tapped into something we all recognize.

In this episode, we'll look at why a price or an age or a test

score that falls just under a round number threshold can have an outsize impact. We'll describe a

bias that can influence our decisions about the music swapping... How we categorize diamonds.

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