Yeah i was hung over and tierd and my brain just wasnt working. You wont believe me but i actually used to be pretty good at maths in school, but that was a while ago now.😅
if it makes you feel any better, I did a couple semesters on math college plus a couple years on computer engineering and recently went to a therapist… When they asked me how old I was, I couldn’t calculate my age for the life of me
I stayed about 2 fucking minutes trying to calculate it… And in the end it wasn’t even the right age lmao
Ten number ending in 9 is essentially the same as those same ten numbers but ending in zero plus ten nines.
$1.19 = $1.10 + 0.09
$1.19 + $1.69 = $1.10 + $1.60 + (2 * 0.09)
Since there were 10 items, each ending in a 9, that’s the same as 9 times 10, or in this case $0.09 * 10. Every time you multiply by 10 you end up with a zero on the end.
In a base 10 system multiplying by 10 basically shifts all the digits over by 1 and adds a zero to the end. Whatever was in the 10s spot goes in the 100s spot. Whatever was in the 100s spot goes in the 1000s spot, and so on.
So, if you buy 10 items with a 9 at the end of their price, you’ll always end up with a zero in the cents spot. If you buy 100 items like that, your total will be in dollars with zero cents.
What’s more impressive here is that so many of the other digits ended up as zero when there was no pattern. Ten items ending in ‘9’ means that you carry over a ‘9’ to the next column, but to get that to be zero means the sum of all the tens (of cents) digits needed to end up in a 1.
1 + 6 + 9 + 4 + 9 + 9 + 6 + 6 + 2 + 9 = 61
And to get to exactly 40, the dollars digits needed to match that 6 plus 1 carried over (1 + 9), so they needed to end in 3 (or to be 33 exactly for the total to be 40):
1 + 1 + 6 + 5 + 3 + 3 + 5 + 5 + 3 + 1 = 33
Ignoring the fact that grocery stores suck and price things ending in 9 all the time, it’s a 1/10 shot to get the cents digit to end up as a zero, a 1/10 shot for the hundreds to end up as zero, and 1/10 for the dollars digit to end up as a zero. OP just used up a lifetime of luck for a 1/1000 occurrence.
I was wondering the same thing. I was trying to buy exactly 10 items because that’s the max they allow at the self check out now. I’m wondering if that increase the odds greatly or something.
Buying 10 items would definitely make this way more likely, because we have a base-10 counting system.
To simplify the problem, if you look at the cents digit, $0.09×10 items = $0.90. If you look at both cents digits, they were mostly $0.99. $0.99×10 items = $9.90.
All you’d need in either case there is something to cost $0.10 more to get a nice even number.
If you’re so desperate to find out what, exactly, OP bought, if you type the numbers on the left side of the receipt into the Target website search bar and pull up the exact products. That is way too much effort for me though.
Yes, the one near my house is less than a quarter mile away and I can take my bicycle without having to ride with traffic. So it’s worth the extra cost for me.
Thanks for making me spend like 30 seconds of my life reviewing someone’s grocery receipt. We’re really starting to stretch the mildy part of mildly interesting, but apparently I’m here for it.
This right here is exactly the kind of content that was posted in r/mildlyinteresting when it was new. After the sub went popular the content was way too interesting for my liking.
NE has the same no-grocery tax rule. A handful of states have no sales tax in general (I believe SD and either NH or VT for example) and many, if not all, won’t tax groceries purchased with whatever food stamps are called in the respective state
This creates a need for the law to distinguish between grocery stores and restaurants, leading to artificial barriers to innovation within the marketplace.
Laws should be simple, and create a level landscape on which people can make design choices motivated by utility, instead of adherence to the unnatural incentive landscape of a highly-varied legal system.
It only takes O(1) effort to adapt one’s brain to nature, and to the set of societal arrangements that naturally arise within nature. It takes O(N) effort to adapt one’s brain to new sets of rules that change the incentive landscape, where N is the number of times the rules change.
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