---
title: 2430 Product The Menu Item That Sells Another
description: "## The Demand Before your next menu print or reprice, pull your three highest-priced items and ask what each one is actually doing on the page — selling itself, or moving the Guest's sense of what everything below it costs.…"
url: "https://kb.jeffreysummers.com/docs/2430-product-the-menu-item-that-sells-another/"
updated: "2026-08-03"
category: Product / Product Fieldbook
---

# 2430 Product The Menu Item That Sells Another

## The Demand

Before your next menu print or reprice, pull your three highest-priced items and ask what each one is actually doing on the page — selling itself, or moving the Guest's sense of what everything below it costs. Walk your menu top to bottom the way a Guest reads it, and mark which items exist to be ordered and which exist to move the reference point. Then ask the \[Decoy Effect\] question of each one: is this steering the Guest toward genuine value, or away from their actual preference toward margin. Decide which anchors stay because they serve the Guest and which are quietly running \[Transactional Embezzlement\] under a menu-engineering label.

## The Work

List your three highest-priced menu items — the ones most likely to function as anchors rather than sellers:

**Anchor item 1:**

What it is priced against — the item just below it that benefits from the comparison:

Guiding the Guest toward value, or engineering them away from it — Guiding or Engineering:

**Anchor item 2:**

What it is priced against — the item just below it that benefits from the comparison:

Guiding the Guest toward value, or engineering them away from it — Guiding or Engineering:

**Anchor item 3:**

What it is priced against — the item just below it that benefits from the comparison:

Guiding the Guest toward value, or engineering them away from it — Guiding or Engineering:

The one item on your menu you cannot honestly defend as serving the Guest's decision:

What you will do with it this week — reprice it, resequence it, or remove it:

The question you will ask before your next pricing or sequencing decision: is this option set designed to serve the Guest's decision, or engineer it away from their actual preference: