When I’m at a restaurant and say: “We’ll have a bottle of your Italian Merlot, please,” I actually mean: “Give me a bottle of your second cheapest wine, please.”
Many months ago at Pizza Express I fell into a well laid trap and assumed the second cheapest bottle of wine would be the second one on the list – below the house wine. I was wrong: The second and third cheapest bottles had switched places.
Now, check out the signup page for 37Signals’s Highrise shown below.
When I first saw this page I thought the Highrise house wine would be on the far right. It’s not. The solo and basic accounts are positioned the same as the Italian Merlot I ordered.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with this. It’s logical for businesses to try and draw attention to their higher margin products. The Guardian recently did a piece on “how restaurants entice us into choosing expensive meals“. The short answer is menu layout. The same as the Merlot and 37signals.
