Why does every restaurant customer seem to pay a different price?

Because most wholesalers agree pricing customer by customer, often product by product, as relationships develop over years - a loyal account gets a rate nobody else sees, and it is rarely written down anywhere beyond the owner's memory.

How many pricing arrangements does a typical wholesaler actually run?

It varies by size, but one wholesaler's own four years of trading produced 317 separate pricing arrangements across a few hundred customers - more arrangements than customers, because the same account can have several product-specific rates.

Is a spreadsheet enough to track customer pricing?

It helps briefly but drifts out of date quickly, because arrangements change as often as customers ring up, and a spreadsheet only updates when someone remembers to open it and edit it, unlike the memory it was meant to replace.

What happens when the person who knows the prices is away?

Whoever answers the phone either guesses, charges the standard rate, or has to track someone down to check - and the customer, who remembers the arrangement even if nobody else does, notices the difference immediately.

Blogs

The prices in your head are worth six figures and nobody has written them down

27 Jul 20264 min read

Most wholesalers price each customer differently - a discount agreed on the phone, a fixed rate for one product, a margin nobody wrote down - and none of it lives anywhere but the owner's memory. That knowledge has real value: one wholesaler's own book runs to 317 separate pricing arrangements, none of them recorded on paper anywhere else.

Nobody decided to keep it in their head

It happens gradually. A customer asks for a better rate on tomatoes because they order every week, and it is agreed on the phone in ten seconds - never a spreadsheet, never a form, just a number that sticks from then on. Multiply that by every customer, every renegotiation, every product-specific favour done for a loyal account over several years, and the price list a wholesaler actually runs on has nothing to do with the one typed up when the business started.

One wholesaler's own catalogue, built up over exactly four years of this, runs to 317 separate pricing arrangements sitting across 338 invoiced customers - not 317 customers with one discount each, but 317 individual agreements, because the same customer can have three different arrangements for three different products. None of it was written down anywhere a second person could read. It lived in one head, updated by memory, corrected when a customer complained it had been forgotten.

What that costs when the person with the head is away

The risk is obvious the day the owner is on holiday, in hospital, or simply busy, and somebody else has to answer a pricing question. They guess, or they charge the list price, or they ring round trying to remember what was agreed - and whichever they do, the customer notices, because the customer remembers the arrangement even when nobody else in the business does.

It also means every new member of staff who takes an order is working from an incomplete picture. A kitchen orders coriander, gets charged the standard rate, and rings up annoyed that it has "always been" a different price - and they are right, it always has been, just not written anywhere the person on the phone could see.

A price list with one entry per product is not what a wholesaler actually runs on. Three hundred and seventeen separate agreements is.

It gets worse exactly when the business grows

The problem does not stay the size it started at. A wholesaler with fifty customers and a handful of arrangements can genuinely hold the whole list in his head, and probably does, accurately, for years. A wholesaler with three hundred customers and years of individually negotiated rates cannot, however good his memory is - the arrangements have simply outgrown what one person can carry reliably, and growth is exactly the point at which most businesses hire a second or third person to answer the phone, which is also the point at which the gap between what is in the owner's head and what everyone else can see starts costing real money every week rather than occasionally.

There is also a quieter cost that never shows up as a single mistake: a business that cannot see its own pricing clearly cannot easily tell whether an arrangement made three years ago still makes sense. A discount agreed when a customer was small and growing is not automatically still the right rate once that customer is one of the largest accounts on the book, but nobody reviews an agreement they cannot see laid out next to the others.

Why a spreadsheet does not really fix it

The instinct is to write it all down once, in a spreadsheet, and be done with it. It helps for about a month. Arrangements change, new products get added with their own quiet exceptions, seasonal rates come and go, and the spreadsheet drifts out of date in exactly the way the head it replaced never quite did - because the head updated itself in real time and the spreadsheet only updates when somebody remembers to open it.

The same drift shows up in what customers are actually called. One wholesaler's book carries 1,241 different kitchen names across a few hundred real customers - trading names, old names, nicknames a driver uses, the name on the door against the name on the invoice - and every one of those has to resolve to the same pricing arrangement or the whole exercise is pointless.

What actually holds

The arrangement needs to live somewhere that updates the moment it is agreed, is checked automatically every time an order is priced rather than trusted to memory, and survives the person who set it up going on holiday. That is a software problem more than a discipline problem - the business already has the discipline, or it would not have kept 317 agreements straight in one head for this long. What it does not have is a second copy.

Plainly

What it will not do on its own

It will not invent a pricing arrangement it has not been told about - a genuinely new agreement still has to be entered once by a person.
It does not negotiate the price with the customer. That conversation stays exactly where it is.
It will not silently override a price someone typed by hand for a one-off reason - it flags the difference rather than deciding which is right.
Cross-grade product substitutions are never priced automatically - a different grade is a different product, and it goes in a separate, clearly labelled lane.

Questions people ask

Why does every restaurant customer seem to pay a different price?: Because most wholesalers agree pricing customer by customer, often product by product, as relationships develop over years - a loyal account gets a rate nobody else sees, and it is rarely written down anywhere beyond the owner's memory.
How many pricing arrangements does a typical wholesaler actually run?: It varies by size, but one wholesaler's own four years of trading produced 317 separate pricing arrangements across a few hundred customers - more arrangements than customers, because the same account can have several product-specific rates.
Is a spreadsheet enough to track customer pricing?: It helps briefly but drifts out of date quickly, because arrangements change as often as customers ring up, and a spreadsheet only updates when someone remembers to open it and edit it, unlike the memory it was meant to replace.
What happens when the person who knows the prices is away?: Whoever answers the phone either guesses, charges the standard rate, or has to track someone down to check - and the customer, who remembers the arrangement even if nobody else does, notices the difference immediately.

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