One word: mallbots
A script is allowed to know what the 5th lowest price for an item is. Not the current lowest price.
The user, of course, can manually do a mall search and discover all of the prices.
I wasn't aware that we displayed mall prices in the Item Manager - as opposed to the Purchases frame, but if we are, I am sure it is showing the same 5th-lowest price, so as not to have to do a mall search for every item.
In any case, the lowest price is often NOT what you want to offer your items for; just because one shop is offering an item for 100 Meat, limited to 1/day, if the 2nd - xth price is 1,000 Meat, do you, too, want to mall sell your item for 100 Meat?
Mall price is an option in the item manager. Click the little "square with a down arrow in the corner" button that's at the junction of on top of the scroll bar's "up" and the "Autosell" button. The options to show stuff are: "item name", "autosell" (shows autosell price), "quantity", "mall price", "power", "fill", and "adv/fill".
And yes, I'll sell the crap out of items by undercutting everyone I can, and not limiting items. If I'm moving 30 items at 100 meat each, with no limit and the next highest is selling at 1000 meat, but not moving any product, then I'm the one coming out ahead of both the person selling with limits and the person tying to sell at higher prices. My goal is to get rid of the stuff. And anything over auto-sell is pure profit, on my end.
I do a fair amount of trading, too. So, being able to quickly look up prices for a number of items is a huge bonus for both parties. I get what I want, they get what they want, and feel like they came out with a good deal. The practice has gotten me a few trading partners that have turned into online friends.
If it were only a handful of items affected now and then, I wouldn't have posted the feature request. It happens very often with items I'm wanting to get rid of.