Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2015 December 16

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December 16

$19 a month donation

Recently I have seen several PSAs on U.S. television for charitable organizations (including the Humane Society of the United States and the Wounded Warrior Project, among others) soliciting for donations. Invariably, they ask people to contribute $19 per month. Is there some significance to this amount? Why not a more round number, such as $20 or $25?    → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ Ⓜ 19:30, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Possibly Psychological pricing. Nanonic (talk) 19:53, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Also, it might take the average citizen a bit longer to mentally compute the annual cost. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:37, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

In addition to using numbers that end in 9 to seem like less, there might also be a psychological effect of being less than a $20 bill. If we had $30 bills in the US instead of $20, then they might have suggested $29 donations. (I, for one, have a "large bills" and "small bills" section in my wallet, and $20 is the largest denomination I keep in the small bills section.) StuRat (talk) 17:20, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

A flat 19 dollars a month seems strange. Typically it would be more like 19.95. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:58, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

That would kind of defeat the purpose of making the annual cost hard to calculate. Maybe that would seem kind of penny pinching for a charity, even businesses generally stop taking every penny when the percent lost gets small enough (I doubt they sell cars for $19,999.99 and not one penny less) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 14:45, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

Maybe you can calculate 12 x 19.95 in 5 seconds or less. Not everyone can. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:03, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

I believe the idea is that anyone doing that calc would just use 12 × $20. Also, they would actually think of it as $20, as a result, which negates the advantage of getting potential customers to think of it as only "$10 something". StuRat (talk) 15:58, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Hence, the ones who set such a price are only fooling themselves. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:04, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes, the trick is figuring out when most people switch from thinking of the price as "$10 something" to "about $20". Is $19 low enough ? Maybe $18 ? StuRat (talk) 19:31, 20 December 2015 (UTC)