It's not the price that matters... it's the way you print it!

Thanks to Marcia Yudkin, Marketing Expert for this great article! http://www.yudkin.com/markmin.htm

A price is a price, right? Not really, according to Cornell University researchers, who tested whether restaurant owners would profit most when menu prices were formatted as $20.00,
20.00 or twenty dollars.

To their surprise, the 20.00 format netted the most, with customers spending 8 percent more when menus used numerals to represent prices, minus any dollar signs.

Without the dollar sign or the word "dollars," diners were apparently reminded least that what they were ordering was making them a tiny bit poorer.

Specialists in the field of "menu engineering" have also discovered that menus bring in more revenue when they insert prices at the end of each small paragraph describing the item, rather than all lined up in a column that can be quickly scanned from top to bottom.

Likewise, those who study these things tell us that we tend to perceive $23 to be less than $23.00.

One more finding: When looking at menus, we take prices like $20.00 as indicative of higher quality food than prices like $19.99.