The Ultimate Price is Right Strategy Guide: Vend-O-Price

Vend-O-Price

Rules

A prize is shown. Three shelves are shown, each of which has a grocery item. The top shelf has the cheapest item while the bottom shelf has the most expensive item. Then each shelf is revealed to have a certain number of its featured item. The contestant must determine which shelf is the most expensive shelf.

Random fact

For the first couple of playings of this game, they used the old Penny Ante sound effect when revealing the grocery products. You can see the debut playing of the game here:

Win-loss record

• Actual (seasons 44-47): 34-33 (50.75%)
• What it would be by random chance: 1/3 (33.33%)

The correct shelf to choose was...(seasons 44-47)

• The top shelf: 18 playings (26.87%)
• The middle shelf: 27 playings (40.30%)
• The bottom shelf: 22 playings (32.84%)

Strategy

Much as this is a lame way to end the blog, know the prices of the grocery items. But one thing that can help is to think of this game in terms of ratios; for example, if one shelf has twice as many of a product as another shelf, then the item on the shelf with fewer items must be worth at least twice as much as the item on the shelf with more items to be more expensive.