I want to introduce you to one of St. Louis’ premier restaurants, Charlie Gitto’s. It has been around for decades and you can be sure of a great meal, with great service and a quiet place where you can hear your tablemates. So go on over to their website and check out their menu. I’ll wait while you take a look.
What don’t you see on their menu? Prices! Now lest you think that this is common among top-tier restaurants, I did a quick check and found many of their competitors have prices listed, some who charge even more than Charlie Gitto’s does.
My interior designer wife reminded me of another example. We have been to one of her lighting supplier stores. There are no printed prices on any of the items in their showroom. Instead, there are QR codes that you can scan for the retail prices. Imagine looking at a dozen lamps or whatnot: this gets tedious really quickly. Far easier to just bring up the Google pages.
This is not a new subject for me. I wrote about this back in 2011 when I said priceless is not a marketing strategy. Back then, I wrote that those vendors who don’t publish prices really are unsure about their pricing strategy, and so have instructed their PR firm or marcom team to just omit this information and see what the reaction is by potential customers and other related parties. Based on this free research, they will come back and adjust the Web pages and add the appropriate pricing.
Well, I was wrong. These priceless vendors never plan to publish anything publicly. Take a look at these two examples which are long on details on how their prices are calculated without providing any actual dollar amounts.
Tines’ page shows you how many degrees of freedom a price depends on: depending on how you count, there are four basic tiers (one of which is free, kudos to them), and seven different add-on tools, and five different usage tiers and you get at least 140 different prices, and then a note saying that older customers are on a different pricing model. Yikes!
I was eventually able to squeeze out a range from Tines, but it took several emails. Now I realize that posting a fancy restaurant’s menu and posting a $500,000 or so enterprise security service are different things, but not really. What if when you came into the restaurant, and they presented you with a menu that had different prices for the following
- If you are going to pay cash, you get a slight discount, since they avoid the credit card processing fee (I have started to see more this situation).
- If you are going to occupy your table for more than 90 minutes, there will be an add-on per minute charge.
- If you made a reservation for a certain size party but show up with fewer diners, you will be hit with a surcharge.
You get the point. Some restaurants are even charging in advance, when you make your reservation. Those are restaurants that aren’t getting my business.
When I first wrote about this situation, I had a lot of comments. One vendor told me they cleaned up their act and thanked me for my POV. One small step for vendorkind. But really folks: the harder you make it for your customers, the fewer customers you will have. And that is something really priceless.
We are going to Disney and my wife just sent me menus for 4 potential restaurant’s to select one for our first dinner. All of them had pricing but it did not matter. I went with the food and enviroment not cost.
I was so weird that you email was next on my list to read.
I mostly looked and the food and images from your link – it did not occure to me there were no prices.
It is one thing to knowingly get reamed when you can see the prices in advance and still tolerate it, but it is something else entirely to just bend over and ask for it when no prices are shown. It is an extension of the dreaded “market price” quotation on many menus for some “specialty” item. I generally do not even inquire about it or order it because it makes me feel cheap to have to ask, kind of like asking about the gas consumption on that nifty yacht (if you have to ask, you can’t afford it). I have never understood how anyone would buy anything without knowing the price in advance.
In the B2B/enterprise space, I see a lot of big companies “shipping their org chart” where each BU or profit center breaks out its own product bits/prices with separate SKUs. That’s hell for customers — who can’t easily pick the 24 individual bits and pieces that form a working solution — but lets each BU get clean-but-logically-flawed P&L rollups.
Often heard in the exec hallways “I’m not building Widget X that supports your P&L unless I get a split of the revenue credit or I can assign my own price to the piece my team builds.”
Two related long-form posts of mine: https://richmironov.substack.com/p/headpm & https://richmironov.substack.com/p/price-points-drive-organizational
Back in the day, some high end restaurants had ladies’ menus. Those menus had no prices while the men’s menus did. The idea was that ladies could order what we wished, without worrying about what it would cost our escort.
Sometimes the maitre d’ would hand the men’s menu to the lady and then need to snatch it away. Always a funny experience. ;>