Same food, different price
Right after college, in my first city neighborhood, there was this great restaurant I went to. The place was unusual in many ways, a labor of love by its eccentric proprietor. (Neal Pollack profiled it way back when.) But what impressed me most was the pricing structure: it was unlisted, unpredictable, and constantly changing. Not like some fancy place where the off-menu prix fixe is even grander than the standard one. No, this guy would serve you whatever rustic thing he had cooked-for-a-crowd that day and then name a price for your table when you were done, a price ranging from reasonable to free.
Rumor had it that this variable was determined largely on how rich a customer looked. I never confirmed this, but it certainly made sense given the radical manifesto on the wall—and the homeless people at the next table. As young adults with college degrees, cash poor but with the prospects and safety nets of comparative privilege, my friends and I had lively debates about what we should wear to that place. We were perhaps too new to town to recognize the rare gift of such a dining room: in a diverse and gentrifying neighborhood, people of widely varying means could all eat out affordably—not at a new $$$ place and the old $ one next door, but at the same place, rubbing shoulders and eating the same food.
I thought of this restaurant over the years whenever I encountered a business with a pay-what-you-want model (most famously, Panera Cares). Here it’s the buyer, not the seller, determining the price, but with a similar goal: affordability for all, gathered in one place.
