The Demand

Before your next menu print or reprice, pull your three highest-priced items and ask what each one is actually doing on the page — selling itself, or moving the Guest’s sense of what everything below it costs. Walk your menu top to bottom the way a Guest reads it, and mark which items exist to be ordered and which exist to move the reference point. Then ask the [Decoy Effect] question of each one: is this steering the Guest toward genuine value, or away from their actual preference toward margin. Decide which anchors stay because they serve the Guest and which are quietly running [Transactional Embezzlement] under a menu-engineering label.

The Work

List your three highest-priced menu items — the ones most likely to function as anchors rather than sellers:

Anchor item 1:

What it is priced against — the item just below it that benefits from the comparison:

Guiding the Guest toward value, or engineering them away from it — Guiding or Engineering:

Anchor item 2:

What it is priced against — the item just below it that benefits from the comparison:

Guiding the Guest toward value, or engineering them away from it — Guiding or Engineering:

Anchor item 3:

What it is priced against — the item just below it that benefits from the comparison:

Guiding the Guest toward value, or engineering them away from it — Guiding or Engineering:

The one item on your menu you cannot honestly defend as serving the Guest’s decision:

What you will do with it this week — reprice it, resequence it, or remove it:

The question you will ask before your next pricing or sequencing decision: is this option set designed to serve the Guest’s decision, or engineer it away from their actual preference: