Comment by redwall_hp
6 hours ago
That sounds close to the Sears system to me, but they used the tens place. 8x was used for returned big ticket items, like appliances and treadmills. It would start at 88 and the rightmost digit would decrement to indicate how many weeks it had been sitting there.
It was 00 for full, 99 for sale (the majority of items, except for the one week every year they established the full price for that product), 8x for clearance.
Ah yeah, I forget the details. It was a sophisticated system. I’m curious of the origins. Did this have bookkeeping or business reporting benefits in the pre-digital age? Even when we were using computers at the turn of the millennium it helped signal discount eligibility without having to update and synchronize inventory with promotional offers.