At the wholesale market this morning, the order form showed a case of yeast up eighteen yuan. I did the arithmetic twice in the margin, then left the price tag exactly where it was.
The reason is not a flattering one: I was afraid my regulars would think I was profiting off a bad season. Four shops on this street sell baking powder and yeast. Whoever raises his price first gets cursed first. Everyone knows it.
But the accounts don’t recognize common knowledge. Eighteen yuan a case, twenty-odd cases a month, that’s three hundred and sixty. Not a fortune, but swallowing it whole leaves a sour taste. And then I noticed I had quietly begun doing something else: looking at other brands. One was six yuan cheaper, the packaging a little worse, the dough a little slower. I brought a case back to test. The steamed buns came out a size smaller.
That was the moment I understood.
Holding a price down is not generosity. It is a fiction. Cost does not disappear; it merely reappears in another guise: in cheaper goods, in a short weight, in a scale that leans, in a face that has lost its patience. Of these four, the customer usually never catches the first three. He always feels the fourth, but cannot say why. Every one of them is uglier than a price increase.
A price increase is done in the open, and the customer has a choice: accept it, or go elsewhere. Downgrading is done in the dark, and he has no choice at all — he doesn’t even know he has been shortchanged. I had thought I was being decent. In fact I was taking the decision out of his hands, in a way he could not see.
I had also overestimated how much my own face was worth. A regular who has bought from me for years — I mentioned, tentatively, that yeast had gone up. She was more direct than I was: it should have gone up long ago, I know what you pay for it. Then she said: that brand you switched to last time doesn’t work. My dough wouldn’t rise and I thought my hands had gotten worse.
That made me blush. She had known all along. She simply hadn’t wanted to say so. The two of us had been sparing each other’s feelings, and neither of us came out ahead.
One more thing: the people upstream are more direct than I am. The factory’s rep called at the start of the month and said three things — which items, by how much, effective from which date — then asked whether I wanted to stock up in advance. No preamble, no explanation of raw-material markets; he said it and hung up. At the time I thought him brusque. Now I think he saved me the work of guessing.
I have since turned the phrase “I’m embarrassed to” over in my mind, and I think it fails in one particular place: it saves you the trouble of speaking now, and puts the debt on a shelf where no one else can see it. Embarrassed to refuse, so you agree and then stall. Embarrassed to ask for money, so you wait for the other person to remember. Embarrassed to make a demand, so you hope he guesses. A debt on a shelf does not evaporate. It comes back at the moment least resembling a debt — the day your face is wrong, the day you give a little less, the day you suddenly lose your temper, and the other person has no idea why.
So this is how I handle a price rise now: say it once, in full. How much, why, from which day. No probing, no splitting it into two steps, no “it may go up” followed by half a month of waiting. One blunt sentence said out loud weighs less than ten hints.
That afternoon I changed the tag, wrote the new number in marker, peeled the old one off and did not throw it away — it went to the bottom of the drawer. Nobody asked the next day. On the third day the regular came in as usual, scanned, paid, and said nothing extra.
It was only at closing, in the evening, that I worked something out. What I had been afraid of these past months was not losing customers. It was that sentence — “So you’re like that too.” As if a person in business, the moment he acts like a businessman, has let someone down. But this is how business is done: a clear price, real goods, no debt on either side. Hold that line, and whatever goodwill remains is genuine — not something propped up by my keeping her in the dark.
卜世 撰
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