Cutting your price feels like the safe way to win business. It is usually a trap. A discount buys a short spike and little that lasts, and the people who come for a bargain do not come back for you. What grows a small shop is being worth choosing, and that is where your effort should go.
The marketing scientist Byron Sharp argues, from years spent studying how brands grow, that price cuts do little for the long run; what lasts, he says, is being easy to recognise and easy to buy from (Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know). A sale trains people to wait for the next sale. It teaches them your work is worth less than you charge. And it drags you into a fight the big shops will always win, because they can go lower than you can afford to.
Small Business Saturday is the day to remember this. It is tempting to mark it with a discount, but that is the one day the whole point is you, and a markdown wastes it. The lasting win is a new regular, and people become regulars through welcome and word of mouth, not a one-day cut. You can see this on the Small Business Saturday run-up: spend the goodwill on turning today’s customers into people who come back, not on shaving your prices.
So if not price, what do you compete on? The things a chain cannot copy. Being the one who knows your name. Being local and proud of it. Doing the job properly and turning up when you said. Being a face, not a logo. These are what make someone choose you at a fair price and tell a friend afterwards, and none of them cost you margin you cannot spare.
When you do want to give people a reason to act now, reach for value before you reach for a cut. Add something small rather than taking money off: a little extra thrown in, a bit more on a gift card, a free small thing for the children that brings the whole family in. Adding value keeps your prices intact and still feels generous, where a discount just lowers what people expect to pay.
There is a time for a genuine offer, of course. Clearing seasonal stock, quiet-hour deals, a real thank-you to loyal customers, these are fine because they are honest and occasional. The trap is making the cut your main pitch, so that “cheap” becomes the thing you are known for. Cheap is the easiest promise to beat, and there is always someone bigger who can beat it, so a shop known only for being cheap is a shop waiting to be undercut.
A caution. Charging fairly for good work is not arrogance, and refusing a race to the bottom is not greed. If your prices are genuinely too high for what you offer, that is a different problem, fix the offer. But do not let a nervous week talk you into training your customers to value you less.
The short version: do not sell yourself on being the cheapest, because a discount buys a spike and costs you the future. Compete on the things no chain can copy, service, welcome, being local, doing it right, and when you want to nudge a sale, add value rather than cutting price. Be worth choosing, and you will not have to be the cheapest.
Keep showing why you are worth choosing in What should I post?, so you sell on value rather than on being the cheapest.