What it does to the table

Keeping up feels like something you do alone, quietly, to stay at the table. It isn't. Every person at the table is doing it, and your part in it is holding the pace for the others.

Frank's cascade runs at the scale of a country, but it runs at a single table too. When you match the second bottle, you make the second bottle normal, and the person to your left who'd been wondering whether to say something sees that you didn't, and doesn't. When you say "count me in" to Lisbon before the price is known, the two people in the chat who were hoping someone would ask see that nobody will, and say "count me in" too. Your yes isn't neutral. It's a vote for the pace, cast in front of people who were waiting to see how you'd vote.

There's someone at the table who can't afford it. There nearly always is. They haven't said, because saying is what nobody does, and they're paying the split on a card and going home to a different kind of evening from yours. You don't know who it is. Chapter 3 said nobody at the table knows anyone's finances, and that runs both ways. The person you're keeping up with might be the person who's keeping up with you, at a cost you'd be horrified by if you knew.

This is what the counter-offer does for the table, and it's the reason it's not selfish. "Can we do the corner place?" isn't just a saving for you. It's a door for the person who couldn't say it. Half the table walks through it with relief, and the one who really needed it walks through it without anyone knowing that they did.

And there's the organiser, who's often the most anxious person in the chat. They picked Lisbon because that's what hen weekends are now, and they've been dreading the moment someone says it's too much, and nobody has, so they've assumed it's fine. Asking them the price, kindly and early, is a gift to them as well. It tells them the question can be asked, and that means they can ask it next time, and the pace moves for a group of people none of whom set it.