The Price List That Lives In Three Places

A guest quotes a price back at you that you have not charged in eight months.

They are not mistaken. They read it somewhere, and somewhere is still saying it.

Where the copies live

More places than anyone expects:

The website. Updated when someone remembers, which is rarely and never completely.

The printed menu. Updated at reprint, which is a cost decision rather than a pricing decision.

Whoever answers the phone. Working from memory, or from a note taken when they started.

The listing sites and social profiles. ⚠️ The forgotten ones, and frequently the first thing a new guest sees.

The regulars' memory. Not a copy you can edit, and the one that produces the conversation at the end of the night.

What the drift costs

Disputes at payment. The expensive kind, because they happen in public at the moment of maximum friction.

Staff caught between two truths. They quoted what the website said. ⚠️ You cannot fault them, and you also cannot honour every stale price forever — which is exactly the position nobody wants to be in.

Discounting you never decided. Every honoured stale price is a discount, applied unevenly, to whoever happened to read the old number.

Slower decisions. ⚠️ The quiet cost. If nobody is confident of the price, every non-standard question escalates, and escalation takes a manager away from the room.

Why it drifts

Not carelessness. There is no single place that is definitively correct, so a price change means remembering every copy — and one always gets missed.

Then the missed copy stays wrong for months, because nobody audits prices; they only discover them when a guest quotes one back.

The single-source fix

Decide which copy is the truth. One place. Everything else is a rendering of it.

Write the date it was last confirmed. ⚠️ The single most useful field, and the one nobody includes. A price with a date can be checked; a price without one is trusted forever.

Make changing it a defined step with a list. Website, print, phone note, listings, staff briefing. Five checkboxes, once per change, and the drift stops.

Give the front line the truth, not a summary. The person on the phone needs the actual figure for the actual configuration, including the common variations. ⚠️ A summary produces confident wrong answers, which are worse than uncertain ones.

The variations are where it actually breaks

Headline prices rarely drift. The combinations do:

Group sizes. What happens at eight people, at twelve. Extensions. The extra hour, and whether it is pro-rata. Off-peak. The weekday version everyone forgets exists. Add-ons. The things that are extra but frequently quoted as included.

⚠️ These are the questions that get guessed at, and a guessed answer at the door becomes a commitment at the table.

Handling a stale quote

It will happen. Decide in advance, so it is not decided in front of an audience.

Honour it if it was your published copy. ⚠️ It was your error, it is cheaper than the argument, and it converts a bad moment into a good one.

Then fix the copy that day. The honouring is only acceptable once per stale price. If the same stale number produces a second dispute, that is a process failure rather than a guest problem.

Three to hold

Disputes over price per month. Should be near zero. Anything else is a measurement of drift.

Date each published copy was last confirmed. ⚠️ Anything over three months should be assumed wrong.

Whether the phone answer matches the website today. Spot-check it. It costs one call and it is frequently a surprise.

Where the record has to sit

The price the guest is quoted and the price the system charges have to come from the same place. When the quote comes from a person's memory and the charge comes from a till, the two will diverge and nobody will notice until a guest is holding a bill they did not expect.

tasteck keeps courses and pricing on the same records used to take bookings and produce the bill, so the quoted figure and the charged figure have one source.

The guest is not remembering wrong. One of your copies still says it, and you do not know which one.