Tuesday, 12:10 p.m., Tampa. Someone is standing at the door of Tampa Pasta House. Half an hour ago they asked an assistant, "Can I get the lasagna there at lunch?" The door is locked. The restaurant serves lunch Thursday through Saturday, and dinner from five. Curtis, our AI, is the voice that answers a customer who asks "how much, and when?"
Tampa Pasta House is our sample business.
🧩 Then we checked ourselves
Before blaming the assistant, we read everything we had published about Tampa Pasta House prices ourselves: the page, the hundred items in the catalog, and the Telegram channel. The prices matched everywhere: lasagna $24, tagliatelle $22, the lunch portion of lasagna $15. One word didn't. On October 16 at 11 a.m. Tampa time, our channel said "lunch Thursday through Saturday." At 9:01 p.m. that day, a post about the lunch lasagna said: "$15.00. This special is available on weekdays until the tray runs out." Weekdays include Tuesday, and there is no lunch on Tuesday. We wrote "weekdays" ourselves, in the dish description in our catalog, and the post repeated it.
On October 21 we corrected that line in the catalog. The October 16 post is still in the channel, and anyone can still read it.
The price was right. The word next to it was wrong.
🛠 How to repeat it without code
- Write down the prices of your three to five main items, and every word that sits next to them: "today only," "weekdays," "until 2 p.m."
- Ask your ChatGPT: "How much is <item> at <your business> in <your city>?" Then ask right away: "Where did you get that price?"
- Ask about a price with a time attached: "Can I get <item> on a Tuesday?"
- Mark every price in the answer: ours, someone else's, made up, or ours but out of date.
- Find the line of yours the assistant could have read: an old post, a catalog description, a menu posted as a picture.
🧾 What it cost, and the limits
$0. We reread our own page, catalog and channel. We didn't ask any assistant this time: no AI answers are quoted here. Prices an assistant picks up from delivery apps are a separate question, and we didn't look at it here.
✅ Before you trust an assistant with your prices
- ☐ Ask about your prices yourself, the way a customer would.
- ☐ Keep each price in one place, and copy it from there, not from memory.
- ☐ Reread the words next to a price: "weekdays," "today only," "until two."
- ☐ Check that the hours in every post match the hours on your site.
- ☐ Take down or update a post when its price or condition goes out of date.
- ☐ Ask in your customers' second language too.
Your turn: what does your assistant say to "how much is it, and when can I come in?" Have you checked?
