Front row, back row

The price board at a beach club on the coast is the clearest piece of marketing writing on the whole road, and nobody in marketing wrote it.

Front row. Second row. Back.

The front row costs several times the back one and it goes first, weeks before the season is properly open. The back row sits. It gets quietly discounted, and it fills late, with the families who came for the water.

The sea is the same from every row. Same temperature, same horizon, thirty seconds more walking. Whatever the front row is selling, it is not the sea.

It is the row. A lounger in the front line is a position in front of everybody who has to walk past it to reach their own, and the people walking past are cousins, neighbours, school parents, the rest of the compound. The purchase is made once and read all summer, by exactly the audience it was made for.

Which is why the curve runs backwards here. Raise the price of the front row and it clears earlier, because the price is part of what is being said. Discount it and the thing being bought stops working, and the discount does not bring the buyer back, it moves them to a club that has kept its number up.

An operator who prices this by the square metre of sea view is pricing a product the customer did not come for. The sea is the reason for the trip. The row is the reason for the spend.