At a convenience-store freezer on a summer night, in a supermarket flyer, on the signboard of a neighborhood ice-cream discount shop — the words "half off" sit next to ice cream all year round in Korea. Which is strange. If it's half off all year, that is simply the price. And the more fundamental question: half of what?

The answer lies in the peculiar institutional history this product has lived through: a list price that existed, was erased, then returned — but only halfway. It plays like a four-act drama.

Act 1 — The era of the recommended retail price

Snack bags and ice cream wrappers once carried a manufacturer-printed recommended consumer price — a benchmark for shoppers, a starting point for store tags. The problem: that benchmark was often printed above real transaction prices and used as a promotional device, letting stores appear to be "discounting" at all times. Print a high list price, make the discount permanent, and shoppers keep paying the same amount while feeling like winners.

Act 2 — The open-price experiment (2010): erasing the list price

So the government expanded the open price system, under which the seller — not the manufacturer — sets and displays the price. Introduced for home appliances and others in 1997, it was extended in July 2010 to frozen treats, snacks, and instant noodles. The hope was explicit: with inflated list prices gone, retailers would compete on real prices and prices would fall.

Act 3 — The one-year U-turn (2011): the benchmark vanished too

It didn't work out that way. With the benchmark gone, the same product came to sell for two to three times more at one store than another, and shoppers lost any yardstick for what was reasonable. Controversies over stealthy price hikes piled on. In August 2011, four categories — frozen treats, ice cream, snacks, and instant noodles — were pulled out of the open-price system and returned to recommended retail pricing. A U-turn after roughly a year.

Act 4 — Back, but voluntary: the birth of "permanent half off"

The twist is in the final act. The return permitted labeling; it did not require it. A consumer-group survey reported in 2015 found that over half (56.5%) of snacks, noodles, and frozen treats carried no recommended price, and of 31 ice cream products surveyed, exactly one displayed a price. In that benchmark vacuum, "half off" settled in as the grammar of permanent promotion. When the denominator is invisible to the shopper, the discount rate becomes a number that cannot be verified.

The price-instinct angle — a discount without an anchor is not information

"50% off" is a powerful anchor. But without a denominator, that anchor is driven into thin air. How anchors drag our estimates around was covered in Real Estate Prices and Anchoring Bias; the ice cream aisle is its everyday edition. The defense is to remember absolute prices instead of discount rates. Hold your own benchmark — "this cone is worth this much to me" — and the half-off copy fades into background noise, returning your judgment from "what % off" to "how much per item." The habit of converting to per-item and per-100g continues in How to Spot the Truly Cheaper Deal.

✍️ Operator's note — No product group is harder to assign a "correct answer" price in my quizzes than ice cream. Convenience stores, supermarkets, and discount shops all differ, and none of them can be called the list price. In the end I have to state the survey date and channel and treat that as the benchmark. No aisle teaches better that, for goods without a list price, "who sets the benchmark" is the whole of the price information.

The less a price can be trusted, the more your instinct is the yardstick

When shelf labels can't be taken at face value, what you need is your own benchmark. Judge which of two products is truly cheaper in the AI Price Sense Battle, and build absolute price sense with the Shopping Price Quiz. Other tricks a price tag can hide read from the same stem — quantity cuts in Shrinkflation, and checkout-stage additions in Why the Final Price Differs from the Sticker.

The institutional history here is compiled from press reports of the time, and the survey figures cited are as of those reports (2011 and 2015). Current prices and labeling practices vary by store and date — check actual prices via the Korea Consumer Agency's price portal and in-store tags.