What are Wetherspoons playing at?

I thought I understood the Wetherspoon business model: attractive pubs, with a strong food offering, keen pricing and ruthless efficiency. It looked like a winning strategy.

So, why have they become coy about telling customers how much their drinks cost? At their "Sheffield Waterworks Company" pub this week, it was a miserable experience to choose a bottle of wine to go with lunch.

The food menu is clear. But the separate drinks menu - whilst long on detail - has no prices on it. I asked for a drinks menu with prices: the manager told me that it was now Wetherspoons policy not to give prices on the drinks menu.

Drinks prices for beers and mixers are displayed - on a printed list on an easel as you enter. But if more than the occasional customer paused to make their decisions there, the place would grind to a halt. Sat down at your table, you are faced with heading back to the easel to look a the prices - or asking your companions what they want without knowing how much it will cost.

And if you want wine, there is no help at all - the easel tells you to see the drinks menu, and the drinks menu doesn't tell you. I ended up having to borrow a pen, then stand at the cash register asking the price of each bottle in turn, then writing them down on a drinks menu before returning to my companions to make our choice.

If Wetherspoons were seeking premium cost-no-issue customers, then perhaps this would be a good approach: I am sure there are plenty of up-market outlets which do very well on customers' embarrassment or profligacy to charge prices they would rather not display.

But Wetherspoons have built up a strong reputation as a good-value operation, and the prices I eventually teased out of them were very reasonable. Why on earth would a price-led operation want to hide its prices?

My guess is some aggressive new manager who thinks that this move will let them increase prices without customers noticing, or get customers trading up to higher-margin options that they wouldn't choose if they knew the price.

In the short term, that may work: we didn't walk out when faced with the new guess-the-price policy. But in the longer term, there is a real danger that there will be others like me, vowing not to return to an operation that they once respected, but which seems to have taken a big lurch towards greed and away from customer service.