Pricing And Ethical Business

As of v1.2, we’ll be increasing the price of the 9 pack single orders to $3.99 per pack, or a 22¢/5.8% increase per meal. 6 pack pricing will remain the same.

So, why a small price increase? Simply put... When we first started Vite Kitchens, we had a bunch of guesswork on what things would cost and what operating expenses would look like, but we didn’t have any real world data for it.

We’re now a full fiscal year in, as we started selling Vite Ramen in March of 2019! That means we’ve had the time to do a big ‘ol number crunch on our expenses and how operations are going. 

One of our original mistakes when creating a business plan for Vite Kitchens was to make the assumption that one unit of labor was equal to one unit of labor, and we could assume everything was priced the same that way. Simplification and the want to make numbers and graphs nice and clean creates a homogeneity that forces a conformity that works for no one, and causes problems for everyone. The average person does not exist in the neat boxes that would simplify reports.

This means that to continue providing a workplace that cares about the worker, we’re slightly increasing the price on the 9 pack only. 

This allows us to do things like continuing offering a strong PTO and mental health break policy, adequate wage increases accounting for both performance and inflation, and additional equipment/supplies that makes things easier for different people with different needs. It’s a small change, but given the volume we have, makes a big difference in what we can provide to our people!

I graduated at UC Davis with a degree in managerial economics, so I find economic events and labor economics particularly interesting. 

One of the best lessons I’ve ever learned from that class is that labor, just like everything else, has externalities that need to be addressed. I’m not going to get too technical here, but we can’t just classify labor, and therefore people, as a neat function on a graph with aggregate supply and demand, and plot things that way. There’s many more factors involved, including, but not limited to, things like training, worker health(both physical and mental), safety, and most importantly, happiness.

Some of these can be plotted onto a graph with enough data, like worker efficiency over time. Others would be impossible, or simply foolish to graph, as things like happiness are subjective to the individual person. Even worker health and safety can differ wildly to individuals, as someone who’s exceptionally tall might experience a ton of back pain stooping down to measure things from a low table, for instance, while boxes stacked on high shelves pose a danger to someone with shorter stature.

I hope that helps everyone understand the price increase! Once again, this will not affect subscribers, and subscriptions can be cancelled at any time.

For those of you who read the blog, thank you for reading and thank you for all the support! It means a lot to us, especially when we see people clear up misconceptions on social media, as it definitely gets tiring responding to the same kind of stuff that we’ve talked about on the blogs. Really helps a lot <3

-Tim