Most businesses think they’re being generous when they change or introduce an offer. In their heads, it’s a win-win: a way to reduce cost, add perceived value, or improve efficiency while still “giving something” to the customer. The problem is that what looks good on a spreadsheet often feels very different on the other side of the counter.

A perfect example of this played out with my local Chinese takeaway.

For years, if you ordered over a certain amount, you got a free bag of prawn crackers. Nothing fancy. Just a predictable, comforting extra that everyone expected and quietly enjoyed. They were crunchy, familiar, and felt like part of the ritual of ordering a Chinese. One day, without warning, they stopped giving prawn crackers and replaced them with free spring rolls instead.

On paper, it probably made sense. Spring rolls are more expensive. They sound better. They might even have a higher food cost, which means the business is being “more generous”, right?

Except customers hated it.

Reviews started appearing almost immediately. Not because the spring rolls were bad, but because people felt something had been taken away. The prawn crackers were part of the experience. They were shared, dipped, and nibbled as a family. Spring rolls changed the flow of the meal. There was a small number so it made fair sharing harder and not as free flowing as crackers. What was meant to be a gift felt like an imposition.

More importantly, it broke a small promise.

Customers hadn’t asked for spring rolls. They hadn’t complained about prawn crackers. The takeaway didn’t ask anyone what they wanted. They just assumed that “more value” would automatically be better. Instead, they accidentally told their customers that what they liked didn’t matter.

That’s the real lesson: offers aren’t about value in isolation. They’re about expectation.

When someone chooses a business, they form a mental picture of what they’re going to get. That includes the product, the service, and all the little extras that come with it. When you change one of those without checking, you aren’t just tweaking an offer, you’re rewriting the relationship.

People don’t judge businesses purely on objective value. They judge them on how understood they feel.

The Chinese takeaway didn’t lose goodwill because spring rolls were worse than prawn crackers. It lost goodwill because it stopped listening. The prawn crackers were a symbol. They said, “We know what you like, and we’ll keep doing it.” When they were taken away, that trust quietly went with them.

Before you change or introduce an offer, ask a simple question: is this something the customer actually wants, or just something we want to give them? Those two things are often very different. And as a bag of missing prawn crackers can prove, even small changes can do big damage when they miss that mark.

If you want help translating this into action in your business chat with us