Raised the wash membership four dollars and got fewer complaints than the coffee change
I have owned this wash two years and sold two businesses before it, so I am reasonably hard to scare, and I still put off raising the membership for five months.
Unlimited monthly went from $24.99 to $28.99 on the first of last month. Existing members were grandfathered ninety days and told twice by email and once on the sign at the entry. I braced for a bad week. We lost eleven memberships out of about six hundred, four of them from people who had already stopped coming, and the phone rang maybe six times. Two of those callers wanted to tell me the vacuums were down more than the price bothered them.
For contrast: in March I switched the free lobby coffee from a pod machine to an airpot to save about $90 a month, and I heard about it for three weeks. Somebody left a note.
People will tell you about the thing they can see, not the thing that costs them money.
What I did do carefully was tell the staff first, with the reason, and give them a line to say that was not an apology. The one guy who was sheepish about it got the most pushback from customers.
If you are sitting on a price increase - what is actually stopping you? Mine was a story about my customers that turned out not to be true.