Retail Markup
Via Boing Boing, a story about how Long's Drugs prints the the wholesale price, encoded, on their retail price tags..
When I worked at Ludwig's, we had an even simpler system. The wholesale price was printed on the sticker beneath the retail price and was encoded with the following ingenious scheme:
- Remove the dollar sign and the decimal point.
I kid you not. But no one ever figured it out. The pharmacist even had a racket going with a local podiatrist. The podiatrist would send his patients to the pharmacy to buy "special" athletic tape (wholesale price: $0.30, retail price: $3.00). We always took it out of the box and only sold it as eaches, so customers couldn't figure out the brand. People came in every day to buy the stuff. I never found out what the podiatrist got for his end of the deal.