The kiosk rounds for you

There is a coin in a drawer at home that nobody will take from me. Small, light, worth a fraction of a pound. The kiosk does not want it, the till at the supermarket does not hold it, and the man selling water at the traffic lights would look at me as though I had handed him a button.

Which is why the imported price point does not survive a Cairo counter.

The playbook arrives with a number already in it. Nine ninety-nine. Nineteen ninety-nine. The logic is a century old and it is sound in a market where the till gives change to the cent and most people pay by card anyway. It drops the price into the lower bracket and it reads as a figure somebody agonised over.

Then the pack goes onto a shelf in a kiosk on a corner, where the transaction is cash, the queue is four people deep, and the drawer holds notes and two denominations of coin. Nine ninety-nine becomes ten. Not by policy, by arithmetic, at the counter, every single time, and the extra is a rounding the shopkeeper keeps without ever calling it a price rise.

So the brand has a price in a model and the customer has the next round figure above it, and the difference belongs to the trade.

I have watched teams argue for a fortnight about eleven pounds against nine ninety-nine, when the shelf had answered weeks earlier. The real ladder in an impulse category here is built from the notes and coins that move: the round figure, the half above it, the note in a pocket that has to buy a drink and a snack and come back with something.

Price to the drawer. The drawer has been rounding for you the whole time.