The price is on the wall, and it's the same on a wet Tuesday in January.

Come on a weekday if you can — Saturdays are busy and you'll get less of somebody's attention. Thursday evening is the quietest hour of the week here
Nobody will follow you round — Look for as long as you like. Somebody will say hello, tell you where the coffee is, and then leave you alone until you want them
Open every drawer and lean on things — Especially the corner units and the tall pull-outs. A kitchen is a mechanism and you should test the mechanism
Ask what a door is actually made of — MDF, solid timber, veneer or foil-wrapped, and ask about the edges rather than the face. It's the honest question and the answer should come straight back
We won't take your number at the door — You can leave without giving us anything. If a showroom needs your details before it will show you a price, the price is not the real one

Twelve units is a benchmark, not a kitchen — Nobody's kitchen is exactly twelve units. It's here so you can hold us against anybody else in town, and your own quote will be a different number
Fitting is in all three — By our own fitters, employed rather than subcontracted. A price with fitting left out is not a lower price, it's a shorter list
Appliances are sold at list — No mark-up, and you're welcome to buy them yourself — it makes no difference to us and sometimes you'll beat our price
Worktops are priced separately and honestly — Because the material swings the number more than the kitchen does. Laminate to stone is a five-figure difference on the same run of units
Nothing here is marked "most popular" — There are three of them. Which one is right is decided by what you want to touch every morning, not by an arrow on a page

The "was" price was never charged to anybody — That's the whole trick. A number is set high enough that half of it still works, and then the halving is performed for you in the showroom
A sale that ends on Sunday and restarts on Monday isn't a sale — It's a price. Watch any kitchen retailer for six weeks and you'll never find the week the discount isn't on
Asking us for a discount changes nothing — And it shouldn't have to. In a discounting showroom the person who negotiates hardest pays least — which means the person who hates negotiating is paying for them
Our designers are on a salary — So nobody in this building earns more by selling you a bigger kitchen, and nobody earns less by telling you to keep the units you've got
No ringing the manager for approval — There is no manager to ring, because there is no number to approve. That performance exists to make a fixed price feel like a favour
What you can have instead — The price, in writing, on the first visit, before a survey and before any deposit. That's the thing the discount was standing in for

1 · Carcasses — Material and thickness, and whether they arrive built or flat-packed. An 18mm rigid carcass and a 15mm flat-pack are different products with the same word on them
2 · Doors and drawer fronts — What they're made of, how they're finished, and what happens at the edges. The edge is where a cheap door tells the truth
3 · Runners and hinges — The single biggest difference between a kitchen that still feels good in year eight and one that doesn't — and the thing almost nobody asks about. Named brands, on the quote
4 · Worktop — Material, thickness, edge profile, and who templates it. Templating is a separate visit and it's the reason worktops arrive two weeks after the units
5 · Appliances — Listed by model number, at list price. Swap any of them for your own and the quote just goes down by that line
6 · Fitting, and what fitting excludes — Ours includes the units, the worktop and the appliances going in. It does not include plastering, tiling, electrics or plumbing — those are four other trades and they're quoted separately rather than hidden

A showroom that won't fill it in has told you something — Not that they're dishonest — that their number isn't broken down, which comes to the same thing when you're comparing three of them
Compare the exclusions, not the totals — Three quotes within a thousand pounds of each other are usually three quite different kitchens. The gap is nearly always in fitting, worktop or making good
Ask everyone the same question about hinges — It is the fastest way to tell a specification apart, and the answer takes ten seconds from somebody who knows
Bring the sheet back and we'll go through it — Including the parts where somebody has beaten us. If they have, we'll say so — the price still won't move, and that's the point of a fixed one

The survey happens before you pay anything — A technical survey, free, with a tape and a laser rather than a tablet showing you a picture. Nothing is ordered until after it
The price after the survey is the price — If the survey finds the room is different from the plan, we change the plan and re-quote in the open. What we don't do is order it anyway and invoice the difference
Walls are never square and floors are never flat — Every kitchen has scribes, fillers and packers. Those are in the price rather than a variation, because they are in every kitchen ever fitted
Two things can still change the number — You changing your mind, and something found behind a wall that isn't a kitchen problem at all. Both get priced before anything happens
Lead times are on the quote in weeks — Painted doors are the long pole, usually eight to ten. Nothing is ordered until you've signed the survey drawing, so the clock starts when you say it does
If we got it wrong, we fix it at our cost — A mis-measure is ours. It happens rarely and the honest test of a kitchen company is what they do in the week it happens to you