Fun with Incentives - a penny for a pan and parent economics
As most economists will admit, creating incentives is easy but achieving the desired effect is difficult. Joshua Gans, the author of Parentonomics and a trained economist at University of Melbourne, decided to pay his young son to help him find his morning slippers. Pretty soon he figured out that the son was hiding his slippers and magically "finding" them to collect his dollar.
Recently Albertsons began a Penny-for-a-Pan program that reminded me of the incentives discussion above. For some reason I have fallen into this program, which is weird because I've never collected stamps before and have no real attachment to the Thomas cookware product line.
The way it works is that you collect a sticker for every $10 spent and need to gather enough stickers ( between 50 and 110) to "buy" the pan of your choice.
In practice, the program itself is a mess to follow and manage. Dairy products do not count towards your bill, so a $92 purchase (9 stickers) becomes an $89 purchase (8 stickers). Twice I purchased a pack of gum to get over the 10 dollar divide, just to collect that "so-close" sticker. I found storing the stickers tricky, because they are rather small and are easy to misplace with the all the other receipts and food items. Finally, the stickers need to be attached to a special card, which is a mild pain in the ass... you can't just hand the cashier 60 stickers on the sticker roll.
Yes - I'm sad to say there is a sense of accomplishment bringing that pan to the office. I "earned" it through a series of meaningless incentive steps and now cook with it. I'm only 70 more stickers away from the griddle!
