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The Price Is Right started up its 41st season last week and so I should start up again my tracking of its minor statistical quirks. They didn't play ``Pay The Rent'' on the season premiere, throwing me, but they did for the Friday, 28 September episode, which makes sense as it was the conclusion of their male-models tryout week and were sure to do something for the conclusion of that. (I think they're maybe 20 years behind the curve on getting a male model but otherwise haven't any opinion on them.)
Anyway, for the first ``Pay The Rent'' of the season the items were: Pasta sauce ($1.99), Carrot Juice ($3.79), Cook-Top Cleaner ($5.49 and with a manufacturer's logo that's just so wonderfully 70s), Deodorant ($1.59), Twizzlers ($2.29), and Cake flour ($3.59).
The contestant got off on a wrong but plausible foot by putting at the base layer the deodorant ($1.59), then the pasta sauce and Twizzlers ($4.28), and then the carrot juice and cake flour ($7.38) and mercifully fled with her $10,000. Drew Carey pointed out that one (other) contestant had ever placed items correctly in order --- but left at the $10,000 level rather than get the whole $100,000 --- and then revealed that no, she wasn't the second.
I briefly thought there might be two solutions to this, but no, as best I can tell the only winning arrangement is: Cake flour ($3.59); then pasta sauce and Twizzlers ($4.28); then carrot juice and deodorant ($5.38); then cleaner ($5.49), and how vicious do you have to be that the separation between two levels is a measly eleven cents?
Anyway, for this season, then, the price range has been $3.90. The level range has been $3.20, which, yeah, could be worse.
Trivia: Two months after the Great Fire of New York City (1835) twenty empty lots were sold for $765,000. Before the Great Fire, these lots were worth $93,000. Source: The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America, Kevin Rozario.
Currently Reading: Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation In Turn-Of-The-Century New York, M H Dunlop.
