The Price Increase You Keep Postponing
Costs moved and prices did not. Why the decision keeps getting deferred, what actually happens when venues raise prices, and how to do it without a bad month.
Everything you buy costs more than it did. Your prices are the ones you set some time ago, and every month the decision gets carried forward.
Postponing is a decision. It is just one nobody has to defend.
Why it keeps being deferred
Fear of losing guests. ⚠️ The stated reason, and rarely the real constraint — but it is genuine enough to stop the decision indefinitely.
No obvious moment. There is never a good week. Without a scheduled review, the default is never.
It feels like a confession. As though raising prices admits something. It admits that costs moved, which everyone already knows.
Nobody knows the current margin. ⚠️ The real blocker. Without knowing where you are, any increase feels arbitrary — and arbitrary decisions get deferred.
What deferring costs
Margin, continuously. Not dramatically — a little every night, compounding quietly.
A larger increase later. ⚠️ The one guests actually notice. Three years of deferral produces a jump; annual adjustment produces a shrug.
Decisions you cannot afford. Repairs, staffing, the thing you keep putting off. Deferred pricing produces deferred everything else.
What to know first
Your cost per unit, now. ⚠️ Not what it was when you set the price. Recalculate one or two key lines and the gap is usually larger than expected.
Where you sit locally. Not to match — to know. Being cheapest is a position; being cheapest by accident is not.
Which items are price-sensitive. ⚠️ Not all of them are. The headline items guests remember, and everything else they do not.
How to do it without a bad month
Not everything at once. Move the items where the margin is worst and the sensitivity is lowest.
Round sensibly. Small increases on many items frequently work better than a large one on a few.
Change something at the same time. ⚠️ A new format, a better presentation, an improvement — the increase lands differently when something else moved too. It is not a trick; it is the difference between a price rise and a change.
Tell the team before the guests. They will be asked, and "I did not know" from a member of staff makes it look furtive.
Give them the sentence. ⚠️ One line, honest, that anyone can say. Without it, five people invent five explanations and one of them will be an apology.
What actually happens
Most venues that raise prices carefully report the same thing: less than they feared.
⚠️ Some guests notice and a few comment. Almost nobody leaves over a modest, well-handled increase, particularly regulars — who are more attached to the venue than to the figure, and who have been watching costs rise in their own lives too.
The exception is a large increase after long deferral, which is the case worth avoiding — and the way to avoid it is to not defer.
Making it a scheduled decision
Once a year, on a date. ⚠️ Even if the answer is no change. The point is that the decision gets made rather than avoided.
Look at cost per unit and local position, then decide. Twenty minutes with the actual figures, once a year.
Three to hold
Margin on your top-selling items. ⚠️ Recalculated, not remembered — this is the number the whole decision rests on.
Months since the last price review. Over eighteen means it is being deferred, whatever the reason given.
Volume on changed items, before and after. The only real evidence about sensitivity, and it is specific to your venue.
Where the record has to sit
Knowing whether an increase cost you volume needs the same items counted before and after, on the same basis. If the record is a monthly total, the question is unanswerable and the next decision gets deferred for the same reason as this one.
tasteck keeps orders itemised against takings, so what sold before and after a change can be compared.
You have not decided to keep prices where they are. You have decided, every month, not to decide — and that has been costing more than the increase would.
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