Eleven of them never said a word

The reaction a business can hear and the reaction that reaches its bank account come from two different groups of customers. That is the thing five people who have raised their prices say, without having met, and one of them counted it.

Money & World asked business owners two questions. Whether they had raised prices in the past two years, with the old number, the new one and how long they held off, and what actually happened next. Nineteen people answered in the first day. Five of them answered from their own books rather than in general terms, and they sell completely different things: warehouse space, charging cables, personalised jewellery, holiday rental cleaning and card payment processing.

They do not agree on whether raising the price was the right call. One of them reversed his within weeks. What they agree about is where to look for the answer, and it is not the inbox.

The eleven who said nothing

Answer: Joe Spisak raised warehouse storage from 40 cents to 52 cents per cubic foot in January 2019 on sixty days notice and lost two clients out of forty seven. Eleven more said nothing at all, in either direction, and simply kept shipping. He describes that silence as the part that surprised him.

Joe Spisak runs Fulfill.com, which matches brands to third party logistics providers. The two increases he describes happened earlier, at a logistics business he ran himself.

"We raised fulfillment pricing twice in 18 months at my 3PL, and the second increase taught me more than the first."

"First bump was January 2019. Storage went from 40 cents per cubic foot to 52 cents, a 30% jump. Pick and pack stayed flat at $3.50. We blamed tariffs and wage increases, sent a 60-day notice, expected carnage. Lost exactly two clients out of 47. Both were razor-thin margin supplement brands already shopping around. What shocked me was that 11 clients never said a word. Not an email. Nothing. They just kept shipping."

Sit with the arithmetic for a moment. Forty seven accounts, a thirty percent increase on one of two line items, and the entire audible response came from a minority of the book. Two left. Eleven were silent. The rest fall somewhere in between, and Spisak does not claim to know what any of the eleven were thinking.

That is the shape of the problem. A price rise produces a stream of feedback, and the stream is not a sample of anything. It is self selected by the people most willing to write an email, which is a different population from the people whose spending decides the outcome.

His second increase went the other way, and he is blunt about why.

"The second increase hurt more because we waited too long. By mid-2020, our labor costs had spiked 40% but we held pricing for eight months trying to absorb it. Stupid move. When we finally raised pick and pack from $3.50 to $4.25, it felt massive, a 21% increase all at once. This time we lost six clients, but four of them told us directly they understood and just had to move to cheaper regions. One apparel brand said 'I knew this was coming, you should have done it six months ago.'"

Both of his stated percentages check out against the rates he gives. Forty cents to fifty two is thirty percent. Three dollars fifty to four twenty five is twenty one. The eight month delay is the variable he now regards as the mistake, not the size of either rise.

Then the observation that inverts the usual reading of a complaint.

"Here's what I learned that nobody talks about: the clients who complain the loudest about a 50-cent increase are usually the ones costing you money anyway. We had one beauty brand threaten to leave over the storage bump, ran the numbers, and realized we were losing $340 a month warehousing their slow-moving SKUs. I helped them find another 3PL through what became the early version of Fulfill.com."

The loudest objection in the whole episode came from an account running at a loss of 340 dollars a month. It was not merely uninformative. It pointed in the wrong direction.

He tried the alternatives first, and says so precisely.

"Before raising prices we tried everything. Renegotiated our carrier contracts, which saved maybe 4%. Automated more of the receiving process. Cut our own salaries for three months. None of it covered the gap. The real cost of not raising prices was burning out my team because we couldn't afford to hire enough people."

"If I could go back, I'd raise prices in smaller increments more frequently. A 10% bump every year hurts less than 30% every three years, and clients respect transparency more than you think."

Three customers wrote in and two of them were asking a question

Answer: Jake Wardle raised a charging cable from just under forty pounds to just over forty five, about twelve percent, after two years of absorbing supplier increases. Orders dipped for a fortnight and then returned. Volume across the following quarter was flat against the same quarter a year earlier.

Jake Wardle founded EV Cable Hub, a British retailer of charging cables and accessories.

"We held the price on our best-selling home charging lead for a little over two years. Supplier costs crept up twice in that time and I swallowed both, mostly because I did not want to be the shop that moves its prices every time a container gets dearer."

"The third increase made that impossible. The cable went from a shade under forty pounds to a shade over forty-five, about 12% up. I gave two weeks' notice by email and let people buy at the old price during the window."

The notice window is worth noting, because it contaminated his own short term data and he says so.

"What happened next was duller than I had braced for. Orders on that line dipped for roughly a fortnight, partly because the notice window pulled demand forward, then settled back to where they had been. Across the following quarter, volume on that product was flat against the same quarter the year before."

Two measurements, two different answers. The fortnight after the change showed a fall that was largely an artefact of his own announcement. The quarter measured against the same quarter a year earlier showed nothing at all. A business that watched only the first would have concluded the rise had cost it sales.

Then the written responses, which are the clearest illustration in the whole set of why counting complaints fails.

"Three customers mentioned the price in writing. Two of them were asking whether the specification had changed, which told me they had spotted the number and assumed something else must have moved with it. One told me we had priced ourselves out and bought elsewhere, and I have no idea whether he ever came back."

Three messages, of which two were not objections. They were customers reasoning about the product, and one genuine loss whose ultimate outcome he does not know. That is the entire audible record of a twelve percent increase.

He also tried the alternatives, and puts a number on how far they went.

"What I tried first was trimming packaging and moving courier bands. That bought me about half of what I needed and pushed the rise back a few months. It never got me the other half."

The one who reversed it

Answer: Aviad Faruz raised prices on personalised jewellery, saw sales fall quickly and withdrew the increase rather than wait a quarter to confirm it. He declines to give a percentage from memory. He now holds prices and reduces costs the customer does not see.

Aviad Faruz owns FARUZO Jewelry, which sells personalised pieces.

This is the case that stops the rest of the set from reading as encouragement.

"I raised prices on personalized jewelry and sales dropped hard, fast enough that I walked it back rather than wait a quarter to see. I'd rather not quote a percentage from memory, but the direction was not subtle."

He attributes it to the category and the moment rather than to the size of the rise.

"The timing was most of it. Buyers are stretched, and a gift-priced piece is the easiest thing in a basket to drop."

And then the sentence that states the finding of this piece more directly than anyone else here manages.

"The cost isn't the complaint you can answer, because almost nobody writes to argue about a price. It's the people who quietly don't buy, and they only show up in the sales number a week later."

His remedy follows from it. If the damage is invisible in correspondence, the correspondence is not the instrument.

"Now I hold the price and cut somewhere the customer can't see, and before touching a price I check whether that listing still clears its own break-even on ads."

Note that Faruz and Spisak reached opposite decisions from the same premise. Both concluded that customer commentary is close to worthless as a signal. Spisak responded by raising more often and measuring the client count. Faruz responded by not raising at all and measuring the advertising break even on each listing. The shared move is the substitution of a number for an impression.

She did not raise the price. She changed what the price was for.

Answer: Carolyn Vasquez has held her base rate for two years and instead moved work that used to be absorbed into the base clean, such as oven wipes and garage sweep outs, onto separate line items. Repeat hosts approve the quotes without comment. The pushback comes from newer hosts comparing against last year's scope.

Carolyn Vasquez founded Ready Rental Cleaning, which turns over short term rentals in Los Angeles.

"I have not raised my base rate in two years. What changed is what counts as included in that price. A turnover clean used to quietly absorb oven wipes, garage sweep outs, patio work, whatever a host asked for. Now those show up as separate line items instead of buried in the base number."

This is a price increase that does not appear as one. The headline rate is unchanged and the amount invoiced is higher, which is the move that the disclosure rules further down this piece exist to police.

Her account of who objects matches everyone else's.

"Hosts on repeat bookings barely notice. They get a quote, approve it, move on. Most never ask why an extra sits on its own line now. The pushback comes from newer hosts. They compare a quote to a neighbor's from last year and expect the same scope. I explain it once, plainly. The base clean still covers the same rooms it always did. The extras were never actually free, we just used to eat the cost of them."

The complaint arrives from the people with the least information, comparing against a second hand memory of somebody else's invoice. The customers with the longest relationship, who are the ones a business is actually afraid of losing, approve and move on.

She tried efficiency first as well, and hit the same wall.

"Before splitting out add-ons, I tightened the checklist itself. I kept the same rooms but moved faster, instead of charging more to cover them. Labor and supply costs did not slow down to match. That fix stopped being enough on its own."

The opposition was internal

Answer: Carlos Correa says the hardest resistance to a repricing at a payment processing business he worked in previously came from its own sales team, whose commissions were paid on transaction volume rather than revenue. Realigning the incentive preceded the increase, which he puts at a twelve percent net revenue gain across the portfolio.

Carlos Correa is chief operating officer at Ringy. The episode he describes is at a previous employer, not at Ringy.

"My ex-team waited too long to raise prices, fearing it would kill deal flow and cause churn. When we did, it ended up being a 12% net revenue increase across the entire payment processing portfolio."

"One key driver was aligning our sales commissions, they were originally incented purely on volume of transactions, so they fought price increases."

Everybody else in this piece is describing an external audience. Correa is describing a group inside the business that was paid to argue against the rise, and whose objections would have arrived with the authority of people who talk to customers all day. It is the same measurement error in a more expensive form: an opinion generated by an incentive, mistaken for information about the market.

"We re-aligned incentives so that leadership shared incentives on revenue, including the increases. Before announcing any of this, we did a ton of data analysis across the portfolio and found a lot of dispersion, a high percentage of existing customers were underpriced versus peers. We repriced a lot of 'em, and put in contract inflation clauses so that prices would automatically increase with CPI."

The dispersion finding is the analytical version of what Spisak found by counting. Neither business knew what its own book looked like until it measured, and in both cases the measurement contradicted the assumption that customers were at the limit of what they would pay.

"To create some room during the rollout, we offered more flexibility to customers to control their own costs. We differentiated pricing tiers such that credit card transactions was expensive, but debit was cheaper. You could nudge your customers towards cheaper usage, and still be happy despite the overall higher pricing."

Where the law draws its line, and it is not at the number

Two of the five did not raise a headline price at all. Vasquez moved absorbed work onto separate lines. The business Correa describes split one rate into tiers that priced the same transaction differently depending on how it was made. Both are increases in what a customer pays, achieved by changing the composition of the bill.

That is the manoeuvre that the current disclosure rules on both sides of the Atlantic are built around, and the important point for anyone considering it is that neither instrument limits how high a price may go. They govern what the advertised number is required to contain.

The Federal Trade Commission's Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees, 16 CFR part 464, was published on 10 January 2025 and took effect on 12 May 2025. It defines a total price at 464.1 as the maximum total of all fees a consumer must pay for the goods or services and any mandatory ancillary good or service, while permitting government charges, shipping charges and charges for any genuinely optional ancillary good or service to sit outside it.

That definition is the whole test. Itemising is not prohibited and never was. The question the rule asks is whether the customer can decline the item. An extra the customer may refuse can be quoted separately. An extra the customer must take is part of the advertised total, whatever line it appears on.

Three further obligations follow. Under 464.2(a) a business offering a covered good or service must disclose the total price clearly and conspicuously. Under 464.2(b) it must display that total more prominently than any other pricing information. Under 464.2(c) it must disclose, before the consumer agrees to pay, the nature, purpose and amount of any charge left outside the total, the identity of what that charge is for, and the final amount of payment. Section 464.3 then makes misdescribing a fee, including its nature, purpose, amount or refundability, a separate violation in its own right.

The rule's reach is narrower than its reasoning. Under 464.1 a covered good or service means live-event tickets, or short-term lodging including a hotel, motel, inn, short-term rental or vacation rental. Vasquez sells to hosts rather than to guests, so the rule does not bind her invoices. It binds her customers, when those same hosts advertise the stay. Section 464.4 leaves state rules in place wherever they protect the consumer more.

Britain reached the same distinction through different drafting. Section 230 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 came into force on 6 April 2025 under S.I. 2025/272. It makes the total price material information in an invitation to purchase at section 230(2)(b), and section 230(4) defines that total to include any fees, taxes, charges or other payments that the consumer will necessarily incur if they buy. The same mandatory test, in four words.

Two details of the British section go further than the American rule. Section 230(5) provides that where part of the price genuinely cannot be calculated in advance, the explanation of how it will be calculated must be set out with as much prominence as the total price itself. And section 230(9) provides that omitting information includes giving it in a way that is unclear or untimely, or such that the consumer is unlikely to see it. A disclosure that technically exists but arrives at the wrong moment is an omission.

Wardle sells to British consumers, so section 230 governs his shop. It had nothing to say about his increase, because he raised the advertised number and announced it in advance. The plain rise is the one move in this piece that no disclosure rule reaches.

What the five agree on

None of them decided anything on the strength of what customers said.

Spisak counted clients, and found the count contradicted both his fear and his loudest complainant. Wardle compared a quarter against the same quarter a year earlier, which was the only measurement that was not distorted by his own notice window. Faruz checks whether a listing still clears its break even on advertising before he touches its price. The business Correa describes ran a dispersion analysis across its whole portfolio and found a high share of accounts priced below their peers. Vasquez tightened her checklist and watched the cost per clean until the efficiency stopped covering the gap.

Every one of them also tried to avoid the increase first, and every one reports the same result, which is that cost reduction covered part of the shortfall and then ran out. Wardle puts it at about half. Spisak puts his carrier renegotiation at roughly four percent, and adds that the true cost of holding the price was a team he could not afford to staff.

The one who reversed his rise is not the exception to the finding. He is its clearest statement. Faruz withdrew his increase within weeks precisely because he was watching the sales number rather than the inbox, and the sales number moved. Had he been counting complaints, he would have seen almost nothing, and he would have held the price through the damage.