The call goes the same way every time. “How much to groom a cockapoo?” — and the honest answer needs three facts the person on the phone has not thought about: how heavy the dog is, whether the coat wants a bath and tidy or a full groom, and what state the coat is in when it arrives. A groomer who says one number and then charges another has a complaint; a groomer who explains three facts over the phone has ten minutes gone and a customer who will ask again next month.
A single page answers it before the phone rings, and the page has one property that matters more than its design: its address never changes. That is what lets one QR code be printed, taped to the counter, stuck on the window and stapled to the reminder card, and still be correct after every price change for the next five years.
Five rows is the readable ceiling
Weight is the crudest way to price a groom and the only one a customer can check at home on their bathroom scale. Every groomer already splits the day this way; the work is admitting it on paper. Five rows, in pounds, is what fits on a card and in a head:
- Under 10 lb — chihuahua, yorkie, maltese, dachshund. Bath and tidy is the usual ask; a full groom is often a shave-down for the summer.
- 10–25 lb — shih tzu, poodle, bichon, cavalier. The most common band in most shops, and the one where a coat that has not been brushed for a month changes the price the most.
- 25–50 lb — cocker spaniel, border collie, corgi, cockapoo. Double coats and spaniel ears, so drying time is the number that moves.
- 50–80 lb — labrador, golden retriever, husky. De-shed is the add-on that gets asked about and the one worth printing.
- Over 80 lb — great pyrenees, bernese, newfoundland. Two people, a second table, and a price that reflects both.
The band is a starting point, not a promise. A matted 15 lb dog is a two-hour job; a well-brushed 60 lb dog is a wash and a blow-dry. The page says so in one line under the table, in the shop's own words: “The band sets the starting price; coat condition and handling can move it, and we say why before we start.”
The table: four columns and no asterisks
Four columns is what a customer reads on a phone without pinching. Two of them are prices, one is what the price buys, and one is the thing that most often changes it. The figures below show the layout — they are an example of shape, not a national average, because there is no dated survey in this article and a shop should set its own numbers from its own day:
| Band | Bath & brush | Full groom | What moves it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 10 lb | $45 | $65 | Matted ears, a shave-down, a nervous first visit |
| 10–25 lb | $55 | $80 | Hand-dry vs kennel-dry, de-shed, teeth |
| 25–50 lb | $70 | $100 | Drying time, spaniel ears, a double coat |
| 50–80 lb | $85 | $120 | De-shed season, an undercoat that has blown |
| Over 80 lb | $100 | $150 | A second pair of hands, a second table |
Under the table, three lines that do more work than the prices: nails $15, teeth $10, de-shed $20–$40 by size. Add-ons printed as numbers stop being surprises at the counter, which is where they are most expensive — a customer who learns the de-shed price at collection pays it once and remembers the shop as the place that changed the deal.
Three clauses that end the argument
Almost every dispute in a grooming shop comes from a coat that was not what the owner believed it was. Three sentences, printed under the table in the shop's own words, move that argument to before the appointment:
- Matting. “Matted coat is not a trim, it is a shave: we do not dematt a coat that has felted against the skin, because it hurts the dog and it burns a hand. If the coat has to come off, we will show you before we start and the price is the band above, not a dematting fee.”
- Handling. “A dog that bites, panics or cannot be handled safely may need two visits, a muzzle or a vet; we will tell you at drop-off rather than at collection.”
- Late and no-show. “A no-show is a slot another dog needed. We hold the appointment for fifteen minutes, then it is a no-show.”
The one number worth printing twice: the price of a bath and tidy for the smallest band. It is the question people ask to test whether a shop is expensive before they ask anything else, and it costs nothing to answer it on the first screen instead of the third phone call.
Why the code goes on the wall and the prices go inside
A QR code contains a string. If that string is the shop's address, the code is a door — and everything behind the door can be changed without touching the door. If that string is a PDF of the price list, the code is a photocopy of last season's prices, and the day the list changes the chipboard sign on the window becomes a lie.
This is not a design preference, it is arithmetic: a link to a PDF has to be re-uploaded and gets a new address each time, so a printed code cannot follow it. A page address does not change. The wrapper under this rule is the edit runbook that comes with the kit: change the price, keep the address, and nothing on the wall needs reprinting.
Three pieces to print, measured
The print files this site produces are measured, not estimated, so the sizes below are the actual millimetres of the PDFs, at error correction M with a four-module margin (33 modules of code plus the margin, 41 squares across):
| Piece | Sheet | QR code | Reads at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Counter card | 93.0 × 127.5 mm | 48 mm | about 0.5 m — the person at the desk |
| 70 mm sticker | 70 mm round | 40 mm | about 0.4 m — the lead hook by the door |
| A4 window poster | 210 × 297 mm | 126 mm | about 1.3 m — nose against the glass |
The distances come from the industry rule of thumb of one unit of code per ten units of distance — a rule for a clean, matte, well-lit code and an ordinary phone camera. It is not part of the QR standard (ISO/IEC 18004) and it is a floor, not a guarantee: behind glass that reflects the sky, under a gloss laminate, or through a plastic sleeve that has bowed, plan for 1:8 and expect the phone to need a second longer.
The one placement that fails most often is the collar or the bag. A code at 20–25 mm is below what most phones resolve comfortably at arm's length, and a printed code on a curved, textured tag is worse than one on flat paper. Put the sticker by the door where the lead is picked up, not on the dog.
The 40 characters that cost a fifth of every module
A code's module count grows with the length of the string inside it, and the module is the only thing that has to survive the printer. These module counts were produced by running the same QR call the kit makes, at error correction M — not read off a table:
| Payload | Bytes | Modules | Linear size vs 33 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clean page address | 47–62 | 33 | 100% |
| Address + tracking string | 63–70 | 37 | 112% |
| A long UTM block | 117 | 45 | 136% |
Going from 33 modules to 37 looks like twelve per cent, but the printed square grows in both directions, so it is about a quarter more ink for the same piece of paper. This is why the code on the wall is a clean address with one short tag at most, and why the tracked links live in the email, the social bio and the blog rather than on the chipboard.
What this page does not do
It does not run the calendar. Grooming software with online booking, deposits, text reminders and card-on-file is a different product with a different price, and a shop that needs those should keep them. MoeGo's own pricing page, read on 14 November 2026, lists its mobile-grooming plans at $49, $99 and $159 a month for Basic, Growth and Ultimate. That is a fair price for a calendar that fills itself — and it is not a price list on the wall.
What the page replaces is the paper and the phone call: the price sheet that gets reprinted when a supplier raises a fee, the PDF emailed to every new customer, and the four minutes of “how much, and does that include nails?” that a groomer answers with scissors in hand.
Said plainly: if a shop already pays for booking software and a website builder, this page replaces the builder, not the software. The three-year calculator on this site does that comparison with the shop's own monthly figure, and the dates on the vendor prices are printed next to the numbers, because a cost comparison without a date is a rumour.
The cost of the paper, dated
| Option | Price | Renews? | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free page | $0 | never | one live page, prices, hours, tap-to-call, a visit count |
| Turnkey kit, no tables | $49 once | never | live page + 8 files: delivery note, A4 poster, QR image, print price list, Business Profile kit, edit runbook, review cards, bring-a-friend cards — built by hand, within 24 hours |
| Turnkey kit, with tables | $89 / $149 once | never | the same files plus the table pieces, two revisions and, at $149, ten social cards |
| Grooming software | $49 / mo and up | monthly | calendar, deposits, reminders — not the price list on the wall |
No subscription, no account to order, and the price does not depend on how large the shop is — only on how many tables there are to print for. A grooming shop usually has none, so it takes the eight-file version at the same price as the fifteen-file one.
An afternoon, in five steps
- Write the table on paper first. Five bands, two prices each, add-ons underneath. If a row needs a sentence of explanation, it is a clause, not a row.
- Type the shop once. Name, address or Maps link, hours, the six to twelve lines the page holds. The page takes the same lines the printed list uses, so there is one source of truth.
- Publish and scan it at the real distance. Counter card at half a metre, poster at a metre and a half, with the phone you actually carry and the sun you actually get.
- Print one piece before the batch. A code that fails on one chipboard fails on fifty. Print the counter card, put it where it will live, and scan it twice — once standing, once leaning.
- Put the code where the question is asked. By the desk for the person paying, by the door for the person leaving with a dog that will need another groom in six weeks.
One page, one code, printed once
The page is free and takes about thirty seconds: the shop name, a Maps link and the price list. The printed kit is one payment — $49 for the eight-file version a grooming shop needs — written by hand and delivered within 24 hours, with no subscription behind it.
Related notes
- A hair salon price list that stops the phone calls — the same table logic with the length surcharge instead of weight bands.
- How big the QR code has to be, in millimetres — the printing floor, the quiet zone and the 1:10 rule explained.
- The three-year cost calculator — put a monthly builder or software figure in and see the total.
Sources
Read on 14 November 2026. Grooming software: MoeGo's pricing page lists Basic $49, Growth $99 and Ultimate $159 a month (mobile-grooming plans) on that date; the figure is quoted as that day's list price, not as this site's recommendation. This site's prices — $0 free page, $49 / $89 / $149 one-off kit — are the published figures on /showcase/order. Print geometry — the 93.0 × 127.5 mm card with a 48 mm code, the 70 mm sticker with a 40 mm code, the A4 poster's 126 mm code, the four-module quiet zone and the module sizes — was measured in the PDFs generated by this site's print kit (work/tools/en_print_kit.py, error correction M, four-module margin), not estimated. Module counts for the 47-, 70- and 117-byte payloads were produced by running the same QR call the kit makes, at error correction M. The printer floor of about 0.17 mm per module, the four-printer-dots-per-module recommendation (0.33 mm at 300 dpi) and the four-module margin are from Denso Wave's QR FAQ; the quiet zone as four times the X-dimension also appears in GS1's 2D Barcodes at Retail Point-of-Sale Implementation Guideline. The 1:10 code-size-to-scan-distance figure is an industry rule of thumb, not part of ISO/IEC 18004. Grooming practice — weight bands, hand-dry versus kennel-dry, matting as a shave, the de-shed add-on — is described as practice: no survey is being quoted, and the example prices in the table are a layout example rather than an average, so a shop should print its own numbers.