Your counter gives back more than a small price increase can ever add

Every yard knows the counter discounts. Almost none of them measure it. The number that matters is the realization rate: what fraction of the asking price the part actually invoices for, averaged across everything you sold.

It can be measured wherever both numbers exist on the same part — the price that was set, and the price it left on. The pattern is consistent.

Realization = average invoice price divided by the asking price at the time of sale.

Somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of every dollar on the ticket never makes it to the invoice. That is not a failure — it is how the trade works. But it has a consequence most yards have never done the arithmetic on.

A 5 percent increase is inside the noise

If your counter routinely gives back something in the mid teens as a percentage, then a price increase smaller than that does not change what the part sells for. It changes what you ask, and the discount absorbs it.

The data agrees, and it is blunt about it. Of parts whose price was raised, here is how often the part eventually invoiced for more than its old price — the only test of whether the increase was worth making.

“Beat the old price” compares the final invoice against the price the part carried before the change.

Raise a part 8 percent and you have a worse-than-coin-flip chance of beating the old number. Raise it 40 percent and two thirds of the time you do. The pattern is not that big increases are braver. It is that a small increase is a rounding error on a price that was roughly right, and a big increase is a correction to a price that was wrong. Only the second kind is worth the keystroke.

Raising the price does not park the part

The universal objection to repricing upward is that the part will sit. It mostly does not. Most raised parts move inside a month, and realization stays flat — hovering around four fifths of asking — no matter how large the increase is, right up to the point where the price doubles.

Two honest caveats sit in that table. Time on the shelf climbs steadily with the size of the increase, and realization finally breaks once you go past a doubling — those parts invoice several points worse than everything else. Past that point you are no longer correcting a price; you are testing one.

Not every part type behaves the same

Realization varies more by part type than by anything else. Same yards, same counters, same year — a raised engine invoices at barely seven tenths of asking while a raised spindle knuckle invoices at almost the full ticket.

Grouped by how much of the asking price survives to the invoice. Individual part types within a band vary.

The high-realization parts are the ones a buyer cannot easily shop: a knuckle is a knuckle, and the customer needs it today. The low-realization parts are the ones with a visible market — engines, doors, tailgates — where the customer has three quotes open. Your discount policy should probably not be one number applied to all of them.

What to do with this on Monday

• Measure your own realization rate. Invoice total divided by asking total, by part type, for the last twelve months. Most yards have never seen the number and are surprised by it.
• Stop making 5 percent adjustments. They cost keystrokes and change nothing. If the price is within 10 percent of right, leave it alone.
• Go hunting for the parts that are 25 percent or more under market. That is where the money is, and it is the only band where raising the price reliably beats what you were getting.
• Set discount authority by part type, not by counter. The parts that hold almost their full ticket should not be discounted like the ones that lose a third of it.