In October, a contractor walked into a supply branch holding a competitor’s quote. He had been buying the same line of fittings all summer, and he wanted to know why his price had crept up since June. The counter rep pulled the account, checked the number against the current price file and confirmed it was correct. 

Correct, but unexplainable. The branch manager went one level deeper and found a surcharge that had been added more than a year earlier to cover a freight problem. The freight problem had resolved within a quarter. The surcharge was not.

The branch did nothing wrong that morning. The price in the system was the price the system held. The failure had happened months earlier, and it was not a failure of discipline. It was a failure of ownership. Someone had owned the decision to add that surcharge. Nobody had owned the decision to take it off.

Why temporary pricing gets created

Most temporary pricing decisions start as good judgment under real pressure. A supplier announces an increase mid-quarter. A tariff lands on a category. Freight spikes for a season. A product goes on allocation and has to be priced to ration it. A single volatile commodity moves enough that holding the old number would mean selling at a loss.

In each case, someone with experience makes a reasonable call and protects margin while the disruption works through the channel. On the day it is made, the decision is usually right. It also has a clear owner. A person decided, often a person approved, and everyone involved understood it was temporary.

What none of them did was decide who would end it.

The decision nobody owns

Here is the asymmetry at the center of this. Adding a temporary price lands on someone’s desk. Removing it lands on no one’s. Starting has a trigger, a name attached, sometimes a signature. Ending has nothing. When the freight problem resolves or the tariff is withdrawn, nothing in the branch reacts because watching for a problem that stopped happening was never anyone’s job. The surcharge does not expire. It simply keeps being the price.

The reason behind it disappears faster than the price does. It lived in an email thread, a note in a spreadsheet tab nobody opens or an understanding between two managers. Then people move. The manager who set the surcharge gets promoted, transfers or retires, and the replacement inherits the number but not the reason. Within a year, the only record is a figure in a field, and no one is assigned to question it.

That is the Margin Memory Problem: a pricing action outlives the event that created it because creating it was someone’s job and ending it was no one’s.

It runs in both directions

It is tempting to picture this only as prices left too high, surcharges that should have come off. This is the version customers notice because it costs them money, which is why it ends up at the counter as a complaint. 

The quieter and more expensive version runs the other way. A price set low to win one big job, then quietly left in place as the default. A concession made to keep a nervous account during a shortage. A one-time accommodation that became standing. Those were meant to be temporary, too, and they had an owner on the way in and none on the way out.

The difference is that nobody complains about a price that is too low. The contractor in October flagged the surcharge because he was paying for it. The customer enjoying a forgotten discount has no reason to say a word. So, the high prices get caught and the low ones compound silently for years, draining margin from the side no one is watching.

What it looks like before you find it

Because no one owns the ending, the symptoms show up long before the cause does.

Override and exception requests climb. The same line gets overridden again and again. The sales team quietly corrects a price the system still insists on. Customers ask questions the branch can’t answer from the record. Two branches charge different prices for the same item and no one can say why.

Watch where the overrides land, not just how many. Exceptions spread across many products and accounts are usually normal discretion. 

Exceptions that pile up on one product family or a handful of accounts are not random. That pile is almost always sitting on top of a temporary decision nobody retired, and the counter has been absorbing it one order at a time. Scattered overrides look like judgment. The ones that cluster look like a price waiting for an owner.

The fix is an owner, not a process

Every fix that works does the same thing: it gives the ending an owner. None of this requires a heavy process.

Name who ends a temporary price the same way you name who starts it. Not an approver who signs and walks away, but the person responsible for revisiting it.

Set the end condition when you set the price. A date, a cost threshold or an event such as “revisit when the supplier surcharge is withdrawn.” A temporary price with no end condition has already become a permanent one.

Write the reason in one line at the moment you make the call. Not a memo. One sentence stating what has to be true for this price to make sense. When that stops being true, the next person has a reason to act, and the context outlives whoever set it.

Put temporary prices in front of that owner on a schedule. A short, recurring look at everything flagged as temporary. Most items close in minutes. The point is that the ending finally has a moment, and a name, attached to it.

The real risk

Temporary pricing decisions are usually made with care. There is pressure, a named decision-maker, often an approval. The carefulness is all on the front end.

The larger risk is not that distributors make bad temporary decisions. It is that they make good ones and then leave the ending to no one. A price that nobody is responsible for retiring does not stay temporary. It just becomes the price. 

Daniel T. Dinh publishes practical research and management frameworks on pricing and inventory decision governance for industrial distributors. Connect with him on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/danieldinh515.