Fifteen dollars a dozen

For a time I sold a dozen bagels for fifteen dollars, and even that felt like a lot to charge.

Bakettes needs a little explaining if you’re new here. I’d quit a good day job, moved from NY to NC, bought my first home, and gone all in on my own business, and then 2008 hit and the economy fell out from under everyone. To keep money coming in while I figured the rest out, my husband and I started baking out of our house and selling at the local farmer’s market on weekends. That was Bakettes.

I picked the one thing nobody else was making

This was never a generic bake sale. I chose New York baking on purpose, because nobody around me was doing it. We were in North Carolina, which is filled with relocated Northerners, and you could not get a decent New York bagel anywhere. So that became the whole thing. Real bagels. Black-and-white cookies, rainbow cookies, Italian cookies and pastries. Enriched rustic loaves, back before the sourdough wave made good bread normal. It was specific, hard to find, and aimed at the exact people who missed all of it.

It worked. We sold out almost every week.

Selling out is not the business working

I read those sellouts as a good sign. The table emptied, the cash came in, the same faces came back. It felt like proof the thing was working.

A weekly sellout means close to the opposite. If a shelf empties every single Saturday, the price was low enough that demand ran past supply every time. Some people wanted what I made and went home without it. A good share of the ones who did get it would have paid more. The emptiest, most satisfying table at the market was the clearest signal I had to raise the price, and I read it as a reason to feel good about myself.

I was pricing against a city I no longer lived in

So why did I hold the price down when everything pointed up? Because in my head a bagel still cost what a bagel cost in New York, and back then you could get a dozen there for under ten dollars. Against that number, fifteen already felt like a lot. Who was I to ask fifteen dollars for a dozen bagels?

That number wasn’t real where I was standing. My customers in North Carolina couldn’t get a dozen bagels for ten dollars, well they could but they were more “rolls with holes” than a good authentic bagel (iykyk). They couldn’t get a good dozen at any price, which was the entire reason they were at my table. The cheaper New York bagel I kept measuring myself against didn’t exist in their world. It only existed in mine. I was competing on price with a memory, and I was the only person at the market who could see it.

Then I built a website, because that’s what I do

Eventually, I did the one thing I actually knew how to do. I build websites. So I built one for the bakery and moved the regulars to ordering online, ahead of time, instead of hoping we’d still have what they wanted by the time they reached the table. We stopped baking on a guess and started baking what was already sold.

Setting a price on a website is a different act than calling one out across a market table. You type a number into a field and sit with it. Away from the people, away from the old New York number in my head, I finally priced the bakery for the place it was actually in. The dozen went from fifteen to twenty-four. Nobody blinked. The demand had been there all along. The only thing that changed was that I stopped letting a price from another life set the ceiling.

You are probably doing a version of this

Most underpricing traces back to a number you carry around that your buyer can’t see and doesn’t share. It might be an old salary, or the rate you set for your first client before you knew anything, or what the same work costs from someone cheaper and less experienced. You price against that quietly, and it caps you, while the person paying has no idea the number exists and would have gone higher.

The market that matters is the one in front of you, not the one in your memory. Your buyer isn’t weighing you against your old paycheck or the cheaper option three time zones away. They’re looking at what you can do for them, here, now. The things pulling your price down are usually yours alone, and usually invisible to everyone but you.

I was the one holding the price down

I think about that farmer’s market more than I expected to. The bagels sold out every week, so it was never about demand. They were underpriced because I set the number against a city I’d left. It’s a lesson I kept relearning in slow motion for years after, eventually with brand work for companies like Disney and FedEx instead of fifteen-dollar bagels, always some version of the same thing. The number holding me back was one I was carrying myself.