0.03% off…
And the punch line is it’s worse than a $5 keyboard off Amazon.
“Four pennies saved are four pennies earned. And four pennies can pay the cover at Madam Hedy’s Desire Dungeon” - Ben Franklin (probably)
four pennies to throw at people out the window of a moving car
That’s an Apple product. Many third-party sellers have contracts that forbid them from putting Apple devices on sale. So they use a clearance tag and eat four cents to try and get more of them out the door.
Typically these UMRP agreements are void once a product becomes discontinued. At that point it can be put on genuine clearance. I have to deal with that with several vendors at my business; none of them give a rat’s ass about the price once they’re no longer listing a product themselves.
It’s more likely a combination of the two in this case; some C-suite asshole somewhere is hyperventilating about how much they’ve “invested” in stock in this product and sees clearancing it as a “loss” rather than what it is, which is unloading dead stock that they’ve already paid for at a value that is still at least greater than nothing and making room for inventory they’ll hopefully have better luck with next time. I imagine subtracting the 4 cents from the price is automatic, and is the tell their system adds to the price of any clearance item. Flagging it at clearance probably also marks it nonreturnable.
I presume for similar reasons, one of my local Walmarts still had up until very recently a back aisle endcap full of “clearance” electronics goods which included some 32 and 64 megabyte USB 1 flash drives for, I believe, a whole three cents less than MSRP, 30 or 40 bucks each. So no wonder they’re still there.
Okay.
FYI, the “Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad” (MQ052LL/A) was introduced in June 2017 and is still being manufactured and sold by Apple.
So as of both the print date on that tag and this comment, it has not yet been discontinued.
(There actually was a Space Gray (read: black) variant of the same model that was discontinued back in 2021)
This could still be a UMRP situation, then. Most of our UMRP or at least MAP agreements have a stipulation where we’re allowed to round the price up or down some small amount, typically up to 49 cents, in order to make the final figure a round dollar amount or make the pennies the same as the other items in our catalog (XXX.99, XXX.97, XXX.49, etc.) ostensibly for aesthetic purposes. This would also cover your system making all clearance items end in 96 cents or whatever the hell.
This is surely a case of corporate stupidity, but whether or not it’s Apple’s stupidity or Best Buy’s stupidity I couldn’t tell you. Possibly both!
Serious answer: Many stores have their price end in 6 or 8 to indicate items that are final sale. So it is clearance as in they don’t want it back, but really the price didn’t nominally change.
Cool! That’s a thing? US stores only, or internationally as well?
It’s typically a US chain practice, but I see it in Canada since we have plenty of Walmarts and Costcos and the like here, I did see it at Hudson’s Bay do it on at least one occasion. Not sure about Europe, not common in Japan since their return policies are different and final sale products tend to use a sticker instead.
Hudson bay liquidation be like
That’s like 1,684.50 Iranian Rial
Manager: You don’t want that discount? That’s fine. I can use it. 4 cents are 4 cents.
