Another pipe parsing issue

I have read with interest, your procedure for getting the left half of a piped value (“CF7 Menus with Pipes”). I have tried the code and it works as advertised. My issue is that if two items have the same right side value, you may not get the correct left side.

In my case the drop down box looks like this:

Select option
[select member-menu
“$60 Non-member|60.00”
“$40 Member|40.00”
“$80 Non-member both levels|80.00”
“$60 Member both levels|60.00”
]

The values on the right must be numeric as they are later used in a calculation. But if the value of 60 comes up I need to know which 60 was chosen. Is there not some way to determine this? I would be happy with a database column showing the left side, or the whole value, or even a number 1-4 of which option was selected; any indicator will do.