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The Charleston Code is a code used by retailers to encode the wholesale price of an item in a string of letters in order to hide the value from the customer. When prices were set by hand and applied to items on a sticker, stores used the Charleston Code to have a way to quickly know both the wholesale and retail price of the item. Naturally, sellers did not want customers to know how much profit the store made on each item, but it was useful to the store to have both prices present on each item.

The code used by many retailers was called the Charleston code because each letter in the word 'Charleston' represented a single digit. That is, c=1, h=2, a=3, r=4, l=5, e=6, s=7, t=8, o=9, n=0. A price of 7.50 can be represented as sln. An item that sold for $14.99 with a wholesale price of $7.50 can be shown as $14.99 sln.

Use in Literature
David Foster Wallace appears to have liked the idea of the Charleston code, citing it in two of his works, Oblivion and The Pale King.