Why do gas stations charge 9/10ths of a cent, and how do they even take that out of your bank account?
In: Other
You don’t get charged that 9/10th of a cent, it gets rounded.
If gas is $3.999 per gallon, and you get 1 gallon, it just rounds to $4.00
Once you get to 6 gallons, it’s 23.994 so it gets rounded to 23.99.
This has 2 main reasons. Back with the first gas stations were made, a single dollar had much more buying power (this has decreased due to inflation) so changing gas prices by a whole cent would greatly change the cost of a whole tank. To combat this, gas stations would tweak the price by fractions of a cent.
At buying 10 gallons at 10 cents a gallon is just a dollar, but 11 cents a gallon makes it $1.10. Changing the price to 10.1 cents a gallon, 10 gallons now costs $1.01.
It sticks around because of the psychological effect that $3.999 looks like much less than $4.00
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