I saw this tweet a few months ago, from an architect and designer:

This is interesting, because it gets at a wide difference of experience and perception depending on which side of the transaction you’re on. This architect has no doubt run into clients who insist on trying to do part of a job themselves, messing things up, making the project more expensive, etc.—and then blaming her for it. So for a business owner doing work for the general public, the best way to protect themselves is to say, “Look, I do all the work, I charge what I charge, you contract with me or you don’t.”

Somebody added this: “Just an example from doing landscapes: owner insists on buying poor quality plants from Home Depot to save money then get mad at you when the plants die a month later and need to be replaced.” I get it.

But having little experience of that side of things, having only been a customer looking to spend as little as possible, my initial reaction to that sign is, why are you going to cheat me out of honest savings? I bought my own tires from Amazon and a taillight from eBay and had a little auto garage install them. Quick, easy, good price. What’s wrong with that? When we had carpet installed, we cut the old carpet up ourselves and had it hauled away for less than the amount the contractor was willing to take off for removal and disposal. Not guilty.

It’s a little bit like the credit card charge issue; credit cards eat into the very thin margins of a lot of small businesses, especially restaurants, and many have begun offering cash discounts or even card upcharges (i.e. the stated price is the cash price). I got into a little bit of an argument over this with someone who had been on the other side of it and defended it as a business practice. I felt ripped off for the price not being the price; he saw customers angry at him wanting to eke out a profit at all. (By the way, I do pay credit card fees and payment processing fees here, on my paid subscription revenues; subscribe if you want to help out this newsletter!)

On this point of profitability, someone offered this example:

It’s more an issue of the loss of profit. Garages, bike repair shops, etc. make a large part of their income from selling/upcharging for the parts. Shop in Chicago had a sign that read something like -“If you keep bringing parts from Amazon there won’t be a shop to install them.”

The business-owner side views the customer-side view as being whiny and entitled. I see the business-owner side exactly that way. Or at least that’s my native viewpoint, the one that comes naturally to me. The mental idea I have of a transaction is that you’re going to get overcharged or nickel-and-dimed and you have to look out for yourself.

I think of an acquaintance who tweeted once about getting reprimanded by a restaurant owner for using DoorDash instead of ordering direct. The acquaintance heeded the advice. More power to someone who could do that. I would probably have never so much as looked in the window of that restaurant again. How does your honor not demand a boycott?

I wonder if not really having known hardship or worked in the service industry closes off the ability to empathize with business owners and service workers. For some people, seeing the guy on the other side as another person just trying to make it, instead of in some sense as an adversary or as an abstraction, comes easier.

Thinking about this makes me realize the general idea I have of engaging in transactions is just that: a particular idea. So many of our debates would be more useful if we went into them thinking “I wonder what ideas or experiences lead people to see this issue differently?” and not “How can so many people be wrong?”

If the business-side story is really true—if the economics of these kinds of businesses simply demands a higher price than “feels fair” to a lot of people—I don’t really know what the answer is. I’ve had this thought about restaurants before, that our idea of fair restaurant pricing is pretty much impossible for a going concern to stay profitable long-term.

And I’ve seen people suggest that as customers we have a duty to eat quickly so as to increase table turnover, order high-margin drinks and appetizers, etc. It’s a really interesting question: does a customer have any responsibility to a business? Is it bad form or etiquette or whatever to only order entrees, or to shave down a price as much as you can?

I rather doubt buyers and contractors don’t do this themselves. So why should customers be made to feel guilty for it? How much of this is industry boosterism and how much is genuine good advice on being a good customer?

I think it comes to whether or not you think there’s anything to this:

This is one of those bedrock conceptual questions that how you answer probably predicts a lot about your worldview.

Another intriguing way you could put the question: is frugality selfish?

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