Good morning, or afternoon, or evening, or... whenever you happen to be reading this!

In short — no it hasn’t!

If you’re a regular, and we love you for that, then you might notice the pricing has changed on the ramen, up about five dollars from before. Good eye!

In reality though, we haven’t actually changed the price at all. When you go to checkout, you’ll also notice shipping has been reduced by five dollars across the board. We’ve talked about it before, but we get a lot of angry, and often abusive messages about our shipping costs. There’s even people who claim we’re charging extra and pocketing the difference, when all we’re doing is forwarding the price that UPS and USPS charges us :(

Being blamed for something that is completely outside of your control really sucks. Seeing it every single day takes a toll on all of us here at Vite Kitchens, and really puts a dent on our mental health. We’ve decided to make some changes to hopefully reduce the amount of rude and mean-spirited comments we receive. A lot of you have also suggested that we roll all of the shipping cost into the price of the product so that we can offer free shipping, which is a good idea we’ve explored. We did test this concept out internally, but because shipping prices are so volatile across the board, it really made things difficult.

So, we instead took an in-between step. Raise prices by five dollars... but also drop shipping prices by five dollars across the board with a neat little bit of code that Eris wrote.

That means the overall price that you’ll be paying will be just about the same as before, but hopefully there will be less rude people and hate thrown our way.

Shipping costs are always one of the biggest problems to deal with as a small business, and especially nowadays, it’s hurting us more and more, in both sales and mental health. We’re testing this change out to see if it helps, and because we’re still all about transparency, we’ll be putting an explanation section in the product listings and shop as well.

As a side note, technically your discounts now give you a slight boost this way too, since it will now also discount off the five dollars we put into the shipping cost, which... isn’t the most, but hey, it’s something, right?

Anyway, thanks for supporting us as always, and we hope this gave you a good explanation of what’s going on! We’re always open to answer questions on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Discord, so if you want to know anything at all, we’ll be there to talk!

-Tim, Tom, and the Vite Ramen team