When was the last time you bought a gallon of milk for $2 1/2? Or a McDonald's value meal for $3 1/4? Or a Sunday paper for $1 3/4? Or a Timex watch for $40 5/8?

Think of the hue and cry that would be heard if your corner grocer priced products to the nearest eighth of a dollar instead of quoting prices in decimals. That store would go out of business in a heartbeat. Fortunately, supermarkets, restaurants, newsstands, and department stores don't price their wares in eighths. Products are priced in decimals and quoted to the penny.

Yet, a marketplace exists where such goofy pricing takes place - Wall Street.

Do you ever wonder why stocks on the New York Stock Exchange are priced in eighths? The practice of using eighths is said to come from a centuries-ago practice when Spanish pieces were the medium of exchange and those pieces could be broken into as many as eight pieces. However, what may have made sense centuries ago makes no sense today. With every other product under the sun priced in decimals, why aren't stocks?

One reason is the powers that be on Wall Street like the current way of pricing stock - for good reason. Wall Street makes its living off the crumbs left behind by investors, and pricing stocks to the nearest eighth produces huge windfalls for broker-dealers. By some estimates, if stocks were priced just a penny or two cheaper, U.S. investors would save billions of dollars a year. Obviously, pricing shares in decimals would crimp the profits of many Wall Street institutions that have gotten fat taking an extra penny or two per share as a result of the archaic system of pricing stocks in eighths.

What makes this tacit fee on investors so insidious is that investors don't even know they're paying it. Most investors understand a mutual fund's load fee or a broker's commission charge. However, most investors don't realize that pricing stocks in eighths has the same effect as paying a load fee or brokerage commission - it reduces your portfolio returns.

Fortunately, change is on the way. The New York Stock Exchange has started decimalization with a small number of stocks and will be expanding the number in the not-too-distant future.

It was inevitable that more favorable pricing would come to the U.S. markets. No exchange outside the U.S. trades in eighths, and the increasing globalization of financial markets made decimal pricing a fait accompli in the U.S.

It's nice to see decimal pricing coming sooner rather than later. Indeed, individual investors will be the better for it.