Why the £5 Seaside Donut Is Not a Rip-Off: The Maths Behind the Summer Window

That £5 donut is not greed. It is a business doing twelve months of arithmetic in three.

It is August, and the beach towns are alive. The ice cream queue is long, the car park is rammed, and someone in that queue is muttering about the price of a donut. I understand the instinct. I also think it is completely wrong, and I want to explain why.

A seaside independent does not trade like a city café. It does not have footfall in November. It does not have a Christmas rush or a Valentine's Day bump or a steady stream of office workers on their lunch break. It has the summer window, those three or four months in the UK where the weather is actually good enough to drag people to the coast. Everything has to come from that.

The wages, the business rates, the stock, the landlord, the insurance, all of it is being covered by what gets taken across the counter between now and September. When that window closes, the till goes quiet. The bills do not.

So when the price of a donut looks sharp, what you are actually looking at is a business owner who has done the maths and worked out what they need to survive until next summer. The markup is the business model. There is no other one available to them.

The person serving you quite possibly remortgaged something to open that shop. They were up before the season started making sure everything was ready. They will still be paying costs in February when you are nowhere near that beach. The £5 is not a stranger's hand in your pocket. It is the price of that place still being there next August.

Spend the extra pound. Get the ice cream as well. Have a proper holiday and stop watching the receipt on a Tuesday afternoon in the sun. Your money in those three months is what keeps the seaside independent alive for twelve.

If you have a favourite seaside independent worth shouting about, send the story to keepthemopen.com.