Fair pricing isn't retail pricing. Your customers are seven-year-olds holding exactly £5, queues move at the speed of change-making, and the "competition" is the stall next door. Three principles cover nearly everything.
Everything at 50p, £1, £1.50, £2 — nothing needing coppers or producing fiddly change. A £1.20 price point halves a queue's speed and confuses the exact audience you want spending freely. The deeper reason: children budget in whole coins. A £5 fair allowance is mentally "five £1 goes" — price a game at £1 and you're one of the five; price it at £1.75 and you're a maths problem. Round numbers aren't just faster; they fit how your customers think.
Quick games (twenty seconds, always win something small) sit best at 50p–£1: the price of impulse, repeatable until the pocket money runs out. Experiences that take minutes — face painting, bouncy castle sessions — carry £1.50–£2.50 comfortably because parents, not children, pay for those, and the queue itself signals value. The BBQ prices against the local chippy, not against the tombola: £2.50–£3.50 for a burger reads fair to adults who know what food costs.
"£1 a go or 6 for £5" raises average spend on games without touching the headline price — and wristband models (one price, unlimited goes on the games) can out-earn per-go pricing at fairs with lots of young families, at the cost of needing confident sizing (price it near what your typical family already spends). Test one of the two each year, keep the winner; your own last-fair numbers beat any article, including this one.
Keeping a genuine 50p tier isn't only decent — it's where the long tail of takings lives. Fairs price for the family that can spend £6 total more often than committees remember, and a child who plays three 50p games this year is the customer whose family buys the BBQ lunch next year. Profit and kindness point the same way here, which makes it the rare pricing decision with no trade-off to agonise over.
General guidance from published PTA practice, August 2026. CAAC.
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