Check-Out
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Check-Out is a pricing game on the American television game show The Price Is Right. Debuting on January 28, 1982, it is played for a four-digit prize, usually valued between $2,000 and $10,000, and uses grocery items.
[edit] Gameplay
One at a time, the contestant is asked to give a price on one of five grocery items. After all five products are played, the contestant's cumulative guesses are totalled.
The actual prices for each grocery item are then announced, one at a time. If the contestant's total is within $2 of the actual total of the five grocery items (above or below), the contestant wins the prize.
[edit] Changes to the game
- The original winning range was 50 cents. This changed to $1 in April 1996, before being raised to its current spread in October 2003.
- During the days of the 50-cent winning range, the large center display which displayed the actual total and the contestant's deviation from the actual total was a mechanical vane display. This display was replaced with an electronic "eggcrate" display in 1996, probably at the same time that the winning range was changed to $1.00.
- For many years, the game's set included a "calculator" that the models used to enter the contestant's guesses. The calculator was removed in 2001, largely because the buttons no longer actually did anything after the game's then-recent set change (and because that fact had accidentally been made obvious on the air), and the total of the player's guesses is now figured off-stage and displayed in the center readout.
[edit] Trivia
- In this game's 24-year history, only two contestants have managed to obtain the exact total of their five groceries. However, neither one of them made perfect bids on all five items.
- Currently, the most anyone has missed the actual total of the five items by is $15.98 (with the current $2 range). Such results are usually due to severe underbidding on vitamins and supplements, which in recent years have become more frequent on all grocery product games (but especially in this game). The producer has apparently toned down the difficulty of recent playings in order to increase the win percentage, which seems to have been successful.
- Prior to this game's debut, it was suggested that the winning range should be either $0.50, $0.75 or $1.00 depending on the difficulty of the groceries for a particular playing. By the time the game debuted, the range was fixed at 50 cents until its eventual increase to $1.00.
- Check-Out is the only game in the rotation where a contestant can go over the game's target price and still win.
