lifehacking discounts

How is it like in the western world

From vouchers and coupons in our mailboxes (or sometimes packaged together with your amazon delivery) to billboards and in store hung-from-ceiling adverts, there are two forms of discounts:

1. Those that tells you how much you are saving:

Simple! (but usually comes with minimum spending)

2. Those that requires you to do the complex math in your brain:

So, on top of the conditions, in this case ‘valid on up to 3 games only’ and etc, you may end up picking up a calculator to understand how much you are really saving from this 25% ‘deal’.

Of course, quite often people do not really care about how much they indeed are saving, as long as “they are”. (Not going to delve into the topic about marketing and consumer psychology here, although I reckoned that they are possibly more interesting than what you are going to read next)

The other side of the world — 折！

Mainly in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan where mandrain is the common tongue the character：
【【 折 zhé 】】
means discount! (Yeah to consumerism, again!)

So the syntax will be:
X 折, where X is a number between 0 to 10.

Here, 低至5折 actually means “as low as (低至) 50%”. Which is equivalent to the “up to 50%”.

Take note here! Unlike ‘discounts’ in the western world, X do not equates to the amount that you are getting off the price. Rather, conversely, it refers to the price you have to pay! So in the example, 5 折 simply means ‘Pay 50% of the price you see’. And if it is 8 折, you should interpret it as a 20% discount or paying 80% of the price.

If life is not hard enough, the shop might write something like 7.5 折, and you have to do the tough maths of 25% off like above. And what is the ‘divide-and-conquer’ way of doing so?

I usually use these steps as a quick trick to hack those % discounts and make your life easier when you are stimulating the economy, and prevent yourself for being embarrassed when you pull up your phone calculator to do the maths.

Lets divide-and-conquer:

1. Calculate how much is 10% of the price. 
   The decimal system is truly brilliant here because 10% of, says, $27.99 is simply $2.799! Shifting the decimal point is really simple and it is really similar to the original price.
2. How many 10% are there in the discounts? 
   Very basic arithmetic here. If it is a 25% it is 2 times 10 % plus a 5 %. So you have already gotten rid of the 20% part by adding up 2 10%!
3. What about the 5% (or other percentages)?
   There are a few ways to go about doing so. Either you try to divide the 10% by 2. Or, simply estimate it. 
   Having chosen a really difficult example: 5% of 27.99… is … just half of 10%… so half of 2.799… which is…?! Oh dear. It is still very tough! The simple way out here is to do an estimation a.k.a guess-timation. (I suggest that you underestimate so that when you checkout at the till, you feel a little better) 
   So, if you round it up, that would be half of 2.80 — which is 1.40! Otherwise, round to the nearest number that is less cognitively demanding, and that would be 2.50 which gives you 1.25. Otherwise, go rounding it up to a simpler whole number of 3 which gives you 1.50.
4. Lastly, sum it all up! So that gives us 2.799 + 2.799 + ‘1.40’ = ?? Oh dear, that is still tough… lets approximate it again, and we get 2.80 + 2.8 + 1.40 = 5.60 + 1.40 = 7.00. So the overestimated discount is 7.00, which is easier to get rather than the actual result of 6.9975 (I actually have to used a calculator for this).

The divide-and-conquer strategy works really well here. You break it down to small chunks that are less cognitively demanding, even though it takes more simpler steps to the final answer.

Of course one might argue that if you do the guess-timation step first, that will allow us to calculate 25% of $28.00 — and easily getting the result of $7.00. That is actually a smarter way to go about it!

Lastly, practice makes perfect! If you are standing at the cafe waiting for your latte to go, why not start practicing? Stare at the menu and start doing 10%, 5% discount in your head for every single item. Create problems for yourself, and gain confidence from the method.

I will end off with a short childhood story of mine:

When I was little and still in primary school, pa — dad, will bring my elder sister and I to the void deck to chill. Of course he will be reading his newspaper and enjoying the breeze, while we scoot around. And when we are tired, he will play this small little arithmetic game with us. We sat at the bench to his sides and stared at the carpark. Then, he will describe a car brand and the prefix of the car plate number randomly, before we search for the car and calculate the sum of the digits in the car plate. And years go by, we keep doing it, but instead of addition, we did subtraction, multiplication, and other combination of operators.