Off the Menu
There's a cheaper version of almost everything. It stays cheaper by staying quiet.
I booked a flight last week, the way I always book flights. New window. Incognito. The little hat-and-glasses icon that means the airline can’t see me coming.
I don’t remember who taught me this. Nobody teaches you this. It arrives the way all cheat codes arrive, sideways, from a coworker or a group chat or a guy at a party who lowers his voice slightly, and then it’s just something you know. Search in private mode, or they’ll track your cookies and raise the fare. I have performed this ritual for years. I performed it last week with the quiet satisfaction of a man beating a casino.
Hold that thought. I’ll come back for it.
Because once you start noticing the hidden version of things, you find it everywhere. Starbucks will sell you a cappuccino that appears on no menu in any store. It’s called the short, eight-ounce, smallest of the listed sizes, and it has the same espresso as the twelve-ounce tall, which makes it stronger, closer to what a cappuccino is actually supposed to be, and cheaper. Ask any barista. They’ll make it without blinking. It’s been an open secret for decades, famous enough that the economist Tim Harford wrote it up as a small masterpiece of pricing.
Because that’s what it is. Pricing. The cheap, good version exists for the person who knows how to ask and stays invisible to everyone who is content to pay more.
The company never has to choose between the bargain hunter
and the rest of us. It prints one menu and keeps the other one in
the barista’s head.
The trick is older than the espresso machine. In the 1840s, a French economist named Dupuit noticed that railway companies were building third-class carriages without roofs. Roofs were cheap. The companies left them off anyway, and Dupuit saw exactly why: the misery of third class wasn’t neglect, it was designed, “not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich.” Make the cheap option just visible enough, and just unpleasant enough, that anyone who can afford better flees upward.
The roofless carriage and the unlisted cappuccino
are the same machine, 180 years apart.
The easy read on all this is outrage. Two price lists, rigged game, they’re hiding the deals. The other read is that it’s harmless, even charming, a little club of the informed, if you know you know. Both are true enough. Neither is the interesting part.
The interesting part is what the secrecy is for. The hidden option isn’t hiding from you. The hiding is the mechanism. A company can’t print two prices on the wall for the same cup of coffee; people would riot, politely, in the Starbucks way. So the second price goes unlisted, and the filter that decides who pays which one isn’t based on income, luck, or loyalty.
It’s whether you ask.
The price on the wall is a bet that you won’t.
Now, about my incognito window. A few years ago, economists from Berkeley, Yale, and Chicago gained access to the pricing algorithm of a major American airline and set out to find the cookie trick. It isn’t there. Your search history does not affect the fare. None. Prices move because seats in a fare class sell out, demand shifts, or the algorithm reprices the whole flight for everyone at once. The machine does not know you exist, let alone that you’ve checked the Fort Lauderdale flight four times since lunch.
The most widely believed cheat code in America is folklore. And I think I know why we believe it anyway. It isn’t stupidity. The fare jumped an hour after you looked, and a price that changes right after you look at it feels personal. We would rather be personally hunted than randomly priced. The incognito ritual survives because it delivers something better than a discount.
It gives us the feeling that the game can be beaten.
Which is exactly what the game would want us to feel.
Meanwhile, the real airline cheat code sits in plain sight, wearing a federal seal. Since April 2011, US law has required airlines to refund any ticket, including nonrefundable ones, if you cancel within 24 hours of booking, or a week or more before the flight. Full refund. Original payment. The same law requires airlines to tell you this right exists, and regulators have had to scold carriers for burying it on pages no customer would ever find. A mandated announcement, delivered in a whisper. We invented a fake secret to feel clever about flights while the real one was published in the Federal Register.
So far, coffee and airfare. Pocket change, small thrills. The stakes don’t stay that size.
Until October of 2018, when your pharmacist rang up your prescription, there was a fact they were frequently forbidden to say out loud: that the cash price of the drug, the price with no insurance at all, was lower than your copay. Not reluctant to say. Forbidden. Contracts between pharmacies and the middlemen who manage drug benefits contained gag clauses, and the pharmacist stood there, three feet away, watching you overpay, legally muzzled. Researchers found that the copay beat the cash price on nearly one in four prescriptions and that patients overpaid by $ 135 million in a single year. The cheat code was four words, what’s the cash price, and it took an act of Congress, the Patient Right to Know Drug Prices Act, to make the answer legal.
Sit with that. The question was always yours to ask. The answer had to be legalized.
And then there’s the hospital. More than half the hospitals in this country are nonprofits, and in exchange for paying no federal income tax, every one of them is required by law to keep a financial assistance policy, charity care, that shrinks or erases the bill for people who can’t pay it. The policy must be written down. It must be posted. What no law requires is that anyone say it to your face. One large hospital system trained its staff to tell every patient, no matter how broke, that payment is expected, and to hold any mention of assistance until after asking for money several times. The state of Washington sued. The settlement canceled or refunded 158 million dollars in bills.
Then Oregon tried something almost embarrassingly simple. It passed a law requiring hospitals to screen every patient with a bill over 500 dollars. To do the asking themselves. At one Portland hospital, the share of eligible patients rose from 12 percent to 64 percent.
The help didn’t change. The money didn’t change. The only thing that moved was who had to ask, and the number of people the system could afford to help quintupled overnight.
Every unadvertised discount is funded by the people
who didn’t know to ask.
That’s the part I can’t put down. The two-price world isn’t sorting us by wealth. It’s sorting us by homework. The menu board shows one number, and the app in your pocket shows another, and the gap between them is the homework. And the people with the least room for homework, the busy, the sick, the trusting, the ones taking the price on the wall at its word, because taking things at their word is what decent people do, they aren’t missing the discount. They’re financing it.
I’d like to tell you the fix is to become the person who always asks. But I’ve been in rooms where the prices get set, and I’ll tell you what the system already knows: it can absorb the askers. It prices them in. A few people order the short, a few people invoke the 24-hour rule, and the model holds because it was never about stopping the informed.
It was about the rest of the line.
The window is still there on my laptop. Private, it says, like it’s guarding something. Last week I opened it, booked the flight, and felt, for a few seconds, like a man who knows things.
The airline never saw me at all. The bet was never about my cookies. It was the house bet, the one printed invisibly on every menu, every fare, every bill: that I’d take the number on the wall at its word.
I’m asking now.
This is The Unconsidered. A weekly newsletter about the things we stopped looking at, the questions we stopped asking, and what happens when we start again.