★★★☆☆ - Existing member (6 years) Got the email today. My rate's going up to match what everyone else pays. Six years of loyalty and I still end up exactly where a brand new member would be. Doesn't feel very fair.
★★☆☆☆ - New member (3 months) Heard the long-standing members are finally being brought up to the current rate. Would've been nice to know that before I spent three months effectively subsidising a cheaper deal for people who joined years before me. Not exactly fair.
Same announcement. Same business, same day. Read them back to back and neither complaint sounds unreasonable. Both feel treated unfairly. That's the actual problem this post is about.
Leave the price where it's always been, and the second review is what happens: fair to the old customer, unfair to the one next to them paying full price for the same thing. Raise it to match old prices to those paid by everyone else, and the fairness simply flips, the first review's version: fair to the one who was paying the current price, unfair to the one who just lost the price they'd counted on.
Airlines settled this a long time ago, in a way nobody seems to mind. The passenger in 14C paid less than the passenger in 14D, because they booked eleven months earlier. Nobody calls the airline unfair for that, and nobody expects a refund because someone in the seat next to them got a better deal. The difference has a clear, understood reason attached to it: booking time, clearly signposted, the same rule for everyone.
Most legacy pricing situations don't have that. There's rarely a stated reason, a visible rule, or an end point, just an old price that's still running because raising it for existing customers felt like more trouble than it was worth at the time. That's a very different thing from a deliberately designed pricing structure, even though from the outside they can look identical.
The real danger is how long the business lets that difference sit there unexplained. A decision to leave existing customers alone "while things settle" rarely gets revisited on its own. Rarely do people schedules the moment to bring the old price back in line with the new one. Each renewal just repeats the old price. Enough renewals go by, and what was only ever meant to be temporary becomes, in practice, the business's actual pricing policy: two customers, same service, permanently different prices.
There's an old idea that turns up, independently, across a lot of different cultures and languages:
Once something is treated as a short-term exception, it tends to stop being reconsidered altogether, precisely because everyone assumes someone else is keeping an eye on when it should end.
None of this means every customer has to move to the new price on day one. A phased increase, a longer notice period, or a defined date by which the old price expires can all work, and can all be explained honestly to the people affected by them. What makes the difference is not which option gets chosen, but rather whether there's an actual end point attached to it, written down somewhere, rather than a decision everyone quietly agreed to stop thinking about.
If this feels familiar, start here:
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