Commercial corporations try to recreate the mystical and immediately recognizable effect of the cutural icon with their logos/ideograph (by definition the merging of caption and image). The commercial exchange becomes the negociation between two cultural icons: the dollar sign (in North America) and the logo.

In the action of commercial exchange, money takes on the attribute of the caption: The caption banishes all (im)possible signifieds by reducing the sign to its word-image level aka the signifier, aka the surface. It performs the task of a cleaning device. Price, more than any other caption, acts like a signifying vacuum cleaner: it reduces the object to its monetary surface, a connection made more obvious during the transaction, and it banishes all other signified from the commodity. Price detaches the object from the real world.

Now that's something to think about the next time you buy something...