Notice Regarding Cafe Order Simplification

The order used to include something extra. A second item, or an add-on, or an upgrade that had become routine over the course of several months or years of visiting the same cafe on the same schedule.

Then the total changed. The change was noticed at the point of payment, which is a moment of low cognitive bandwidth, and the noticing produced a reaction that was catalogued as brief alarm and was then processed and filed under current conditions.

The extra item was dropped from the order. The order was simplified.

This is the operational structure of cafe order simplification: the order was adjusted in response to a price change, the adjustment was rational, and the primary effect of the adjustment is that every subsequent visit to the cafe now involves a private calculation against the old order and the old total.

The first consequence was monetary. The bill was lower. This was the intended outcome.

The second consequence was experiential. The cafe visit now involved a slight absence where the extra item had been. The absence was not acute. It was more like a comparison point that arrived automatically, without being summoned, at the moment of payment or the moment of waiting or the moment of drinking something that was technically the same as what had been ordered before but was also, in some small way that was difficult to specify, less.

Every remembered old price remains legally active as a comparison point until the buyer stops mentioning it.

The problem with the old price as a comparison point is that the old price is not available. The old price was the price at a previous time under previous conditions. The current price is the price now. These are not the same market moment, but they are compared as though they are, and the comparison produces a chronic mild grievance that is not directed at any entity capable of receiving it.

The order changed. The memory of the previous order did not change, and is now doing more work than the current order.

By October 2022, with Diwali spending and general price awareness at a particular pitch in India, the cafe order simplification was one of many adjustments made by people who were not in financial difficulty but were conducting a continuous private audit of discretionary spending. The audit was accurate. The conclusions were applied. The experience of applying them persisted.

The simplified order arrived.

It was fine.