Yes, in effect, and the friendly way to do it is a weekday rate rather than a weekend surcharge. Your Saturdays are finite inventory: maybe 30 prime weekend days a season, times however many parties fit in one. Your Tuesdays are nearly unlimited. Pricing them the same means underpricing the scarce one.
The inventory math
Count your real capacity. One crew and one rig running Saturdays might have 60 to 90 sellable weekend slots a season. Those slots are what your whole year's revenue rides on, and when they're gone, they're gone. A Tuesday slot that doesn't sell cost you nothing. A Saturday slot sold cheap cost you the difference between what it went for and what it would have fetched in June.
That asymmetry is the entire argument. Airlines, venues, and photographers all price it. Party operators can too.
Two ways to structure it, one clearly better
Weekend surcharge: "Parties are 425, plus 75 on Saturdays." Accurate, and it reads like a penalty. Clients anchor on 425 and feel charged extra for wanting the normal day.
Weekday rate: "Parties are 500. Weekday parties are 425." Same two numbers, opposite feeling. The weekend price is just the price, and the weekday is a deal for the flexible. Nobody has ever resented a discount.
Set the gap at 10 to 20 percent. Bigger than that and you're training clients to question the weekend number.
What weekday pricing actually unlocks
The weekday rate isn't really for birthday parents, most of whom need Saturday. It's for the demand that can flex:
- Summer camps and daycares, whose events are weekday by definition.
- Schools, for field days and end-of-year events.
- Corporate and team events, which prefer weekdays.
- Summer birthdays, where school's out and a Thursday party works fine.
Publish the weekday rate where those buyers can see it and Tuesday stops being an off day and becomes a second product.
The line to remember
You're not charging more for Saturday. You're refusing to charge Saturday prices for a Tuesday, and there's a camp director out there who's glad you don't.