A variation of this hack which is used by my local car wash: Buy a booklet of 10 pre-paid vouchers for the car wash and get a free car wash ... right now.

According to the owners, moving the 'free' car wash to be immediately available rather than at the end of the voucher book say a significant increase in people who bought them - even though ultimately it made no difference financially to the customers.

Another way to make the task seem less daunting is to make the card vertical, presenting four rows (of three stamps each) to complete instead of two rows of six.

Grouping focuses people on immediate completion (visually completing a line or block) and keeping the relevant numbers small (3 and 4 instead of 12), even if the groups have no nominal significance.

This is also known as the Endowed Progress Effect. A paper from 2006 discusses it in a fairly easy to read format.

Extract: "This research documents a phenomenon we call the endowed progress effect whereby people provided with artificial advancement towards a goal exhibit greater persistence towards reaching the goal. By converting a task requiring eight steps into a task requiring 10 steps, but with two steps already complete, the task is reframed as one that has been undertaken and incomplete rather than not yet begun. This increases the likelihood of task completion and decreases completion time. The effect appears to depend on perceptions of task completion rather than a desire to avoid wasting the endowed progress. Moderators include the reason, if any, offered for the endowment, and the currency in which progress is recorded."

PDF is available here: https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/files/?whdmsaction=publi...

ah, the good ol' loyalty card.

I took a grad level marketing class as an undergrad in my time at my university and remember my professor mentioning this very same paper. Always found it fascinating, and at the time I was working at a bakery part time as well. Pitched the idea to them, they implemented, but the gains were marginal. Although, I suspect because business went down simultaneously during that period that no gain or no noticeable change could be seen as something of a positive, because everything else was in decline. So, yeah, I guess you would say it has real world application.

its also a really easy to demonstrate idea. I bring it up every time i encounter a loyalty card, just because I find it so damn interesting and remember the exact moment that my professor told us about this, eye opening example.

Is there a limit to how steep on the gradient you can go with this? If you give someone 900 out of 1,000 will they be rushing to fill in that last 100 because they've only got ten percent left on the card? Or is it limited to easily foreseeable goals in the single digit or near to that range?

What's the evolutionary advantage to run slower when the goal is distant, in humans and rats?

Hacking yourself to run at maximum might be maladaptive (like coffee), unless you are aware of and manage the downsides.

Personally I'm not sure how effective loyalty cards can be. I prefer to shop places where the perceived prices are reasonable over shops that offer big discounts through loyalty programs (e.g. Trader Joe's vs. just about any supermarket chain). The reasoning is that I prefer the freedom to do without mental calculations over rewards programs over actual dollar savings. That is, I'd rather pay more not to have to think about cards, stamps, rewards, etc.

I wonder how this be could be applied to customer service, queues and waiting lines outside of loyalty card programs.

I've experienced this while running- on the last lap, I suddenly feel relief and a rush of energy (or lack of tiredness). I always attribute it to a desire to tough out the last bit so I can get to a greater relief.

I was just thinking today my Starbucks card has buy however many cups of coffee to get to the gold level where you get a few free perks.

Then I realized how foolish I was to buy anything other than the smallest size since I would have made the same progress for far less money.

Apply this to programming, and it's easy to see why people using frameworks and libraries progress further faster: A number of of goals are reached by just spinning up the framework and installing a few gems.

Maybe it is like sex - the closer to the end you get, the faster you tend to go.

If a coffee shop is doing this deliberately to manipulate you, is it therefore ethical to give the illusion of progress to the coffee shop in turn, by stamping a couple yourself?