Pay what you wish: the restaurant where customers can eat for free – if their conscience lets them

Published 10 June 2026 · india

Name: Pay what you wish. Age: Popular since the 00s, but dating back to at least the 80s. Appearance: That’s up to you, my friend

Name: Pay what you wish. Age: Popular since the 00s, but dating back to at least the 80s. Appearance: That’s up to you, my friend. What do you mean, up to me? Pay what you wish (PWYW) is a well-known, if not exactly common, pricing strategy whereby the buyer sets the price of a given commodity. Every buyer? That’s right – you can choose to pay any amount, often as low as zero, or as high as … I choose zero. That’s fine. Alternatively, you might select a price based on your assessment of what the commodity is worth, either generally or to you personally. I don’t care what it’s worth – I want it for free!

Always a popular option. However, the underlying idea is to establish trust between a seller eager to provide value or expand market share, and a fair-minded buyer who … Zero, please. OK, but you may change your mind once you’ve sampled the commodity and found it has value beyond … I ain’t changing my mind. Which just shows it’s a flawed strategy for the seller. Can you give me an example of it proving to be anything other than a disaster? Yes. The Post Modern Times cafe in Minneapolis recently moved from loss to profit after switching to a PWYW model. How can that possibly be? As soon as the struggling cafe became a “free and donation-based” restaurant in January, business began booming.

I’ll bet it did. Now 40-50% of customers don’t pay, but the rest do. With numbers like that, how do they manage to stay open? In part it’s because running on donations means the cafe doesn’t have to pay tax on sales. Ah, the old tax angle. Sly. And the staff are also volunteers working for shared tips and community donations. It sounds as if an awful lot of goodwill is necessary to make this model work. Well, it is Minneapolis: a friendly, liberal city united in – among other things – its staunch opposition to ICE agents targeting immigrants in the streets. Any other examples worth citing? Museums such as the Met in New York use a PWYW entry fee for residents of the city and students.

The fashion retailer Everlane tried a PWYW sale back in 2015. And Radiohead self-released their 2007 album In Rainbows as a PWYW download. How did that work out? Research showed that 62% of fans paid nothing, and the average overall price per download was just $2.26. A failure then. Not at all. It was still more than the share Radiohead would have got by selling at full price through iTunes (about $1.40). Do say: “When it comes to charitable aims or promotional buzz, the PWYW model has its place.” Don’t say: “More pie over here!”