this is exactly what it is, and walmart does it all the time. op is seeing ghosts

Death to America

there we go. that makes sense. could also be a nazi dogwhistle. come to think of it, summing up purchases these days is mostly a matter of whether you have a phone on you and can use the calculator app. The smart thing to do though is look at unit prices and not prices. With food/drink at least. You can have something that looks cheaper but the package is just oversized and the price per gram or whatever is the same or higher.

Fun fact (anecdotal, but still) most big corporate places my friends work for have code to disable things being priced at $6.66. Maybe it's because I'm in a particularly conservative area of the US, but most big box stores and restaurants around here will literally have a discount built in to prevent a ticket coming out to 6.66. 14.88 being a price in that context just feels really odd to me. They know about edgy numbers and don't want to piss off customers. They make money by being as agreeable and sanitary as possible, so not having 14.88 blocked off in pricing seems weird.

Probably 50-50, with no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt, in light of shit like this:

Another screenshot of the inside of 88 Tactical’s shooting range shows an elevation map with the highest point at an elevation of 1488 feet. But according to Peak Bagger, a website that tracks elevations, Omaha’s highest point is around 1,270 feet.

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2022/08/22/emails-show-omaha-police-planned-deal-far-right-linked-gun-shop

I've worked with algorithms that are designed to undercut competitors' pricing on Amazon and I'll confirm this isn't some dog whistle, it's just a weird outcome of computers trying to undercut each other and maintain marketing tricks in the pricing number.

This is what I think it is. Another store is selling the same thing for 14.99 and Walmart has the overhead to undercut by a few cents. Alot of their stuff is priced at $xx.88.