There’s a blazer on Bond Street. You will never buy it. That is precisely why it exists.
A salesperson once steered a teenage tourist—let’s say, conspicuously overwhelmed by the price tags—toward a rack he had no business approaching. ‘Don’t buy it,’ the man said, with the casual authority of someone doing a favour. ‘Just see it.’
What emerged was a coat priced at roughly the GDP of a small municipality. The tourist did not buy it. He bought the thing he had originally wanted, at a tenth of the price, and walked out feeling like he had gotten a bargain. The salesperson had made his sale without making his pitch. It was, in retrospect, a masterclass.
Starbucks needs that jacket.
The coffee chain that once convinced an entire generation that paying $4 for a cup was reasonable—a feat of psychological rewiring that deserves its own chapter in behavioural economics textbooks—has lately seemed uncertain about its next move. Pricing pressure, identity drift, a menu that reads like a committee document.
The cure, counterintuitively, is not to simplify. It is to go more expensive. Conspicuously, almost offensively more expensive.
One coffee on the menu. Priced at $40, or $50, or whatever number makes a first-time customer do a double-take and quietly recalibrate everything else on the board. Not a gimmick, but a gravity anchor. Once the eye has registered that number, the $8 oat latte stops looking like an indulgence and starts looking like prudence. The customer who was hesitating over upgrading from a tall to a grande now upgrades without a second thought. They are, by comparison, being responsible.
This is not a new trick. It’s a very old one. Luxury hotels put a $3,000 suite on their website for the same reason. The $300 room needs context.
But anchoring is only act one. The real opportunity is the spice rack.
Here is a product that currently does not exist, but should: small, well-designed pouches—ziplock, reusable, the kind of thing that signals care—containing single-origin spice blends. Cardamom. Clove (the C4TM blend). A cardamom-cinnamon combination for the adventurous. Each priced at $3 to $5 as an add-on.
The pouches cost cents to produce. They are self-evidently optional. And they are, crucially, social objects—the kind of thing you add to a coffee when you are trying to impress someone, or simply when you want to feel that this particular Wednesday morning is not identical to the last one.
