Eddie Antar, the con merchant who ran Crazy Eddie's appliance stores, dies. Low-cost appliances with advertising to match; his ads made the Ty-D-Bowl Man look like E.F. Hutton.

An interesting character in and out of jail. A marketing genius, the Ted Turner of retail, employees at his stores were instructed, when asked by a customer how much something cost, to always respond, "That's on sale for...."

Perhaps his real claim to fame, and I can't swear to this, was that he was the first retailer in America to round up all prices to ninety-five cents. In other words, before then, a clock radio might actually cost $12.49. Antar made everything in his store something-95. Then, continuing on the same psychology, he thought: well, if it works for .95, it should work for .99, so he raised all his prices to something-99, and made millions more. (Ironically, not too long ago I went into a wine shop around the corner from his downtown Sixth Ave. store; every single bottle of wine I picked up (I was there for an hour) had a something-99 price tag -- as if someone willing to pay $43.99 a bottle wouldn't pay $44. (I was looking for that very special bottle of wine. Something around $7.50.) Even the New Yorker magazine, with perhaps the smartest readership in America, plays this cheap stunt, charging $6.99, I think it is, an issue.)

Also, with Antar: the price tags on the appliances used to have what looked like an inventory number, the number always had a 9 at each end. Such as: 94409 for a $399.99 television set. In fact, it wasn't an inventory number but an in-house price tag: drop the 9's, divide the remaining number in half and that was the store's cost. In this case, $220. That would tell the employee how low he could go, and Christmas week, that could be very low indeed. Such as $230. No joke. Not even crazy.