I have noticed that most high rise buildings I have been in that are more than 13 stories skip floor 13. So if it goes up to floor 15, then it only really has 14 stories. Why is this, and do all builders do this?
That's true in most western cultures. In the east, they don't like the fourth floor.
Western culture is all it is. People think the number 13 is unlucky, and there are so many people who think that, they don't put number 13 as a floor. I think it's pretty funny actually, so yeah, standing on the 15th floor is actually in reality the 14th.
I've been in hundreds of tall buildings around the world. I have never seen a building that did not have a floor labelled the 13th floor.
13 is considered an unlucky number (why I don't know-sounds like another great question) and so often building planners will skip this floor in assigning a number to each floor. This is not the case all over the world. In Japan 4 is considered an unlucky number and is similarly skipped in their high rise buildings. This is due in part to 4 being pronounced SHI which is also how they pronounce the word death.
The floor numbering system of each building is up to the building owner, and does not always match the true floor count. In some parts of the world prevailing superstitions regard certain numbers as bad omens. In the United States and other countries the number 13 is often thought to be unlucky, and likewise in China any number which includes a 4. If you ride an elevator in one of these countries, you may find that there is no button for a 13th floor, or a 4th, 14th, or 24th floor. It is not necessarily the owner or the tenants who are superstitious - most likely the number was omitted out of fear that potential tenants would avoid those floors, causing a loss of revenue to the building. In many other cases buildings skip floor numbers in order to inflate the height (and the prestige) of the floors at or above those numbers. In such a case, a building might skip from 4 to 15, or from 48 to 50 for the executive floor.
