The Weaver's Four Sentences

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, in the weaving shed, where the yarn has gone up a penny and neither man can absorb it much longer.

Two weavers face one rising cost,
Same yarn, same loom, same margin lost.
One keeps his price and thins the cloth,
One writes to say the rate must lift.
Both lose a little trade that year.
Which weaver's loss came back? And where?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two weavers in the town I've never named, and their cloth, in the old chorus, was equally close-woven. Same looms, same yarn from the same factor, and both had held their rates for nine years because raising them was a conversation neither could face.

Then the yarn went up, and it was not going to come down.

The first weaver kept his price and made the difference elsewhere, as men in every trade have always done. A slightly cheaper yarn. A few less picks to the inch, which nobody could see and which he could have defended to any inspector. A cloth that was still perfectly good and was no longer quite what it had been.

His customers did not complain, because there was nothing to point at. What they did was notice, dimly, over two seasons, that his cloth wore through sooner than it used to, and one of them said as much to another, and the sentence that went round the town was not that he had put his prices up. It was that his work was not what it was.

That is the sentence a trade never recovers from, and he had bought it in order to avoid an awkward letter.

The second weaver wrote the letter. It was four sentences long and it went to every customer he had, six weeks before the change.

The yarn has risen and I have carried it for a year. From Michaelmas my rate goes from eleven to twelve and sixpence. The cloth stays exactly as it is, which is the whole reason for the increase. Anything ordered before Michaelmas is at the old rate.

He was ill for two days beforehand, in the way people are about these things, and imagined every reply.

Two customers left, both of whom had been slow payers and one of whom he was glad to lose. The rest did not mention it at all, beyond one man who said he had wondered how the weaver had held out so long, which is a thing customers say rather more often than trades expect.

And a curious thing followed, which he had not looked for. Having been told plainly that the cloth was staying as it was and the price was rising to protect it, several customers thought slightly better of the cloth than they had the month before. He had told them what they were buying by charging properly for it.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

When costs rise you will raise the price or reduce the thing, and there is no third option. The third option, holding both steady out of loyalty, is merely the second one arriving slowly out of your own margin until something gives. What decides your reputation is which of the two you choose deliberately, since customers forgive an honest increase and never quite forgive a quiet decline, particularly because they cannot name the quiet decline and so cannot be argued out of it.

And notice the asymmetry, which is the practical heart of it. A price rise is announced, dated and explained, so the customer knows exactly what happened and can decide. A thinned cloth is discovered by accident, two seasons later, and what it teaches is not that costs went up but that you cannot be trusted to keep a standard when nobody is watching. One of those is a business decision. The other is a verdict on your character.

So write the letter, and let it be four sentences. Give notice, so nobody is ambushed. Say the reason plainly and truthfully, since a real reason is believed and a vague one invites suspicion. State what is not changing, which is usually the important half. And offer the old rate for anything ordered before the date, which costs you a fortnight and buys a great deal of goodwill.

Two things worth expecting. Some will leave, and they will be disproportionately the customers who were already the least profitable and the most trouble, which the innkeeper would have told you. And most will say nothing whatever, which people find hard to believe beforehand and which is what nearly always happens, since your prices occupy considerably more of your attention than theirs.

Three questions, and be honest on the first:

1. When did you last raise your rate? If the answer is more than two years, you have already been paying for it, either out of your margin or out of some small quiet reduction you have half stopped noticing.
2. Where have you thinned the cloth? Name the corners you now cut that you did not cut three years ago: the check dropped, the visit shortened, the material a grade down. Every one is an unannounced price rise that your customer will eventually discover and describe as decline.
3. What are your four sentences? Write them now, while nothing is urgent. The reason, the date, the new figure, and what is not changing. It will be easier to send in six weeks than to compose in a panic.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which weaver's loss came back?

The first man's, and it came back as a sentence rather than as an account. He lost no customers in the month he thinned his cloth, which felt at the time like having got away with it, and he lost them steadily over two years to a phrase he could not answer because nobody said it to his face. His rival lost two in a fortnight, knew exactly which two, and kept everybody else at a better rate on cloth nobody had any reason to doubt.

The verse:

Raise it and say so, and they'll grumble,
And pay, and buy from you next year.
Thin it and hope, and they'll not stumble
On why they stopped. But stop they will.

Until next time. Go and write your four sentences this week, give six weeks' notice, and change nothing else about the work.

P.S. If you truly cannot raise the rate, then reduce the thing openly instead, which is a respectable third path I did not mention because so few take it. Say that at the old price you can now do the smaller version, and describe exactly what it excludes. That is not thinning the cloth. It is selling a different cloth, plainly labelled, which no customer has ever objected to.

Also in the archive: The Carrier Who Charged Half, And What Comes Back For It and A Fifth Off the First.