The Psychology Behind Costco's Free Samples

In 2010, a Minnesotan named Erwin Lingitz was arrested in a Supervalu grocery store after spending an excessive amount of time at the deli counter. In the words of a Supervalu spokesperson, Lingitz had violated “societal norms and common customer understanding regarding free-sample practices.” While the charges were later dropped, the evidence remains incriminating: After a search, Lingitz was found to have stored in his pockets about a dozen soy sauce packets and “1.46 pounds of summer sausage and beef stick samples.”

Lingitz may have gotten carried away, but his impulse is more or less universal. People love free, people love food, and thus, people love free food. Retailers, too, have their own reasons to love sampling, from the financial (samples have boosted sales in some cases by as much as 2,000 percent) to the behavioral (they can sway people to habitually buy things that they never used to purchase).Samples have boosted sales in some cases by as much as 2,000 percent.

There’s no brand that’s as strongly associated with free samples as Costco. People have been known to tour the sample tables at Costco stores for a free lunch, acquired piecemeal. There are even personal-finance and food bloggers who’ve encouraged the practice. Costco knows that sampling, if done right, can convince people that its stores are fun places to be. (Penn Jillette, of the magic act Penn & Teller, has on more than one occasion taken a woman on a date at a Costco warehouse.) (...)

It’s true that free samples help consumers learn more about products, and that they make retail environments more appealing. But samples are operating on a more subconscious level as well. “Reciprocity is a very, very strong instinct,” says Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University. “If somebody does something for you”—such as giving you a quarter of a ravioli on a piece of wax paper—“you really feel a rather surprisingly strong obligation to do something back for them.”

Ariely adds that free samples can make forgotten cravings become more salient. “What samples do is they give you a particular desire for something,” he says. “If I gave you a tiny bit of chocolate, all of a sudden it would remind you about the exact taste of chocolate and would increase your craving.”

by Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic | Read more:
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Conny Berghäll

[ed. Very fluid and original, perhaps a new generation's answer to Michael Hedges.]

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Tsuneaki Hiramatsu, Japanese fireflies, 2008
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Most People With Addiction Simply Grow Out of It

[ed. See also: Here's what I've concluded about 12-Step Programs.]

According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, addiction is “a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry.” However, that’s not what the epidemiology of the disorder suggests. By age 35, half of all people who qualified for active alcoholism or addiction diagnoses during their teens and 20s no longer do, according to a study of over 42,000 Americans in a sample designed to represent the adult population.

The average cocaine addiction lasts four years, the average marijuana addiction lasts six years, and the average alcohol addiction is resolved within 15 years. Heroin addictions tend to last as long as alcoholism, but prescription opioid problems, on average, last five years. In these large samples, which are drawn from the general population, only a quarter of people who recover have ever sought assistance in doing so (including via 12-step programs). This actually makes addictions the psychiatric disorder with the highest odds of recovery.

While some addictions clearly do take a chronic course, this data, which replicates earlier research, suggests that many do not. And this remains true even for people like me, who have used drugs in such high, frequent doses and in such a compulsive fashion that it is hard to argue that we “weren’t really addicted.” I don’t know many non-addicts who shoot up 40 times a day, get suspended from college for dealing and spend several months in a methadone program. (...)

This is one of many reasons why I prefer to see addiction as a learning or developmental disorder, rather than taking the classical disease view. If addiction really were a primary, chronic, progressive disease, natural recovery rates would not be so high and addiction wouldn’t have such a pronounced peak prevalence in young people.

But if addiction is seen as a disorder of development, its association with age makes a great deal more sense. The most common years for full onset of addiction are 19 and 20, which coincides with late adolescence, before cortical development is complete. In early adolescence, when the drug taking that leads to addiction by the 20s typically begins, the emotional systems involved in love and sex are coming online, before the cognitive systems that rein in risk-taking are fully active.

Taking drugs excessively at this time probably interferes with both biological and psychological development. The biological part is due to the impact of the drugs on the developing circuitry itself—but the psychological part is probably at least as important. If as a teen you don’t learn non-drug ways of soothing yourself through the inevitable ups and downs of relationships, you miss out on a critical period for doing so. Alternatively, if you do hone these skills in adolescence, even heavy use later may not be as hard to kick because you already know how to use other options for coping.

by Maia Szalavitz, Substance.com | Read more:
Image: Banksy

The Ingredients of a Market Crash

[ed. See also: Why the bond market is more fragile than you think.]

Our concerns at present mirror those that we expressed at the 2000 and 2007 peaks, as we again observe an overvalued, overbought, overbullish extreme that is now coupled with a clear deterioration in market internals, a widening of credit spreads, and a breakdown in our measures of trend uniformity. These negative conditions survive every restriction that we’ve implemented in recent years that might have reduced our defensiveness at various points in this cycle.

My sense is that a great many speculators are simultaneously imagining some clear exit signal, or the ability to act on some “tight stop” now that the primary psychological driver of speculation – Federal Reserve expansion of quantitative easing – is coming to a close. Recall 1929, 1937, 1973, 1987, 2001, and 2008. History teaches that the market doesn’t offer executable opportunities for an entire speculative crowd to exit with paper profits intact. Hence what we call the Exit Rule for Bubbles: you only get out if you panic before everyone else does.

by John P. Hussman PhD, Hussman Funds |  Read more:

Image: Hussman Funds

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Dark Times

The New York Times plans to eliminate about 100 newsroom jobs, as well as a smaller number of positions from its editorial and business operations, offering buyouts and resorting to layoffs if enough people do not leave voluntarily, the newspaper announced on Wednesday.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the newspaper’s publisher, and Mark Thompson, its chief executive, said that in addition to the job cuts, NYT Opinion, a new mobile app dedicated to opinion content, was shutting down because it was not attracting enough subscribers.

The reductions, they said, were intended to safeguard the newspaper’s long-term profitability.

“The job losses are necessary to control our costs and to allow us to continue to invest in the digital future of The New York Times, but we know that they will be painful both for the individuals affected and for their colleagues,” the note said.

The Times’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, sent a separate note to the newsroom staff. “I will use this as an opportunity to seriously reconsider some of what we do — from the number of sections we produce to the amount we spend on freelance content,” he said.

The Times is not alone in eliminating newsroom jobs. Newspapers across the country have slashed positions this year. The Wall Street Journal cut dozens of jobs this summer, USA Today eliminated 70 positions in September, and Freedom Communications carried out layoffs in January at two smaller local newspapers, The Orange County Register and The Press-Enterprise of Riverside.

Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Thompson said that even with the cutbacks — 100 positions comprise about 7.5 percent of the newsroom staff — The Times would continue to expand and invest heavily in initiatives that supported its growth strategy, like digital technology, audience development and mobile offerings.

by Ravisomiya, NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Wikipedia

The Teenage Thieves of Tumblr

The wonderful thing about Tumblr is that it can generate a subculture for just about anything. One prime example is Tumblr’s shoplifting community.

Shoplifting bloggers came under the media spotlight in April and May this year, when a Jezebel writer stumbled upon a Tumblr post listing various shoplifting accounts. And yes, a shoplifting blog is exactly what it sounds like: Tumblrs where people write about their shoplifting exploits and posts photos of what appear to be stolen goods. Many of them use Tumblr tags like “shoplifting,” so it doesn’t exactly take Sherlock Holmes to track them down.

These posts share a lot of similarities with haul videos, where young women show off the results of their latest shopping spree. “Heres my haul for today!” reads the text post for this photo, tagged #shoplifting and #stealing. “I got like two more dresses but I gave them to my friend lol. The total is about $2,613. Hopefully I can sell some and make some monaay (´∇ﾉ｀*)ノ”

Four months after Jezebel’s “Tumblr Bling Ring” story was picked up by media outlets like the Daily Mail and the BBC, Tumblr’s shoplifting bloggers are still going strong. That sudden burst of unwanted outsider attention now seems like the kind of storm-in-a-teacup drama that happens in any Tumblr community or fandom. The main difference is that most shoplifting bloggers now post disclaimers saying that they’re not really stealing, they’re just roleplaying. “I post things I purchase with my own money and claim that they were stolen,” reads one. “It’s nothing more than a fun hobby.”

But while some blogs claim that shoplifting Tumblr is entirely populated by roleplayers, others are more critical of what one shoplifting blogger describes as “inconsistently applying the roleplaying excuse.”

“If you think that people truly believe that crock of shit you are only too gullible yourself,” they add.

Since all of the relevant Tumblr accounts are anonymous, it’s entirely possible that every single shoplifting blog really is a roleplay account. In some cases, the haul is so impressive that it surely has to be a hoax. Case in point, this post, in which someone claims to have shoplifted two live lobsters.

(People have actually managed to shoplift live lobsters in the past, so maybe this is less implausible than it seems.)

If we were to take all of those disclaimers at face value, then the idea of a thriving roleplay community might be even weirder than the assumption that they’re all the real deal. It would mean that people are going to stores, buying hundreds of dollars worth of clothes and makeup on a regular basis, and then claiming online that all of it was stolen.

Not only that, but they’re offering each other (allegedly fictional) shoplifting advice about how to find CCTV blind spots and deal with RFID tags, as well as discussing their philosophies of why it’s OK to steal. By the time you get to the in-depth walkthroughs of how to deal with certain shoplifting issues at certain stores, the roleplay excuse seems tenuous at best.

by Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, Daily Dot | Read more:

Images: gaylifting and emes/Tumblr

DDiArte, Crazy Kitchen
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It's The End of the World As We Know It

In addition to being the most-watched basic cable network for the quarter in primetime, Fox News Channel saw across-the-board growth vs. Q3 2013. FNC was up +2% in viewers and up +4% in the A25-54 demo for total day viewing and up +10% in viewers and up +11% in the demo in primetime.

by Chris Ariens, TVNewser | Read more:

Reality Check On Car-Care Myths

To paraphrase Mark Twain, it's not what you don't know that can come back to bite you; it's what you know for sure that ain't true. When it comes to maintaining your car, misconceptions abound. And even the best intentions can lead you to spend more money than necessary or even compromise your safety. Here are common myths that can do more harm than good:

Myth Engine oil should be changed every 3,000 miles.
Reality Despite what oil companies and quick-lube shops often claim, it's usually not necessary. Stick to the service intervals in your car's owner's manual. Under normal driving conditions, most vehicles are designed to go 7,500 miles or more between oil changes. Changing oil more often doesn't hurt the engine, but it can cost you a lot of extra money. Automakers often recommend 3,000-mile intervals for severe driving conditions, such as constant stop-and-go driving, frequent trailer-towing, mountainous terrain, or dusty conditions.

Myth Inflate tires to the pressure shown on the tire's sidewall.
Reality The pounds-per-square-inch figure on the side of the tire is the maximum pressure that the tire can safely hold, not the automaker's recommended pressure, which provides the best balance of braking, handling, gas mileage, and ride comfort. That figure is usually found on a doorjamb sticker, in the glove box, or on the fuel-filler door. Perform a monthly pressure check when tires are cold or after the car has been parked for a few hours.

Myth If the brake fluid is low, topping it off will fix the problem.
Reality As brake pads wear, the level in the brake-fluid reservoir drops a bit. That helps you monitor brake wear. If the fluid level drops to or below the Low mark on the reservoir, then either your brakes are worn out or fluid is leaking. Either way, get the brake system serviced immediately. You should also get a routine brake inspection when you rotate the tires, about every 6,000 to 7,000 miles.

Myth If regular-grade fuel is good, premium must be better.

Reality Most vehicles run just fine on regular-grade (87 octane) fuel. Using premium in these cars won't hurt, but it won't improve performance, either. A higher-octane number simply means that the fuel is less prone to pre-ignition problems, so it's often specified for hotter running, high-compression engines. So if your car is designed for 87-octane fuel, don't waste money on premium.

Myth Flush the coolant with every oil change.
Reality Radiator coolant doesn't need to be replaced very often. Most owner's manuals recommend changing the coolant every five years or 60,000 miles. Of course, if the level in the coolant reservoir is chronically low, check for a leak and get service as soon as possible.

Myth Let your engine warm up for several minutes before driving.
Reality That might have been good advice for yesteryear's cars but is less so today. Modern engines warm up more quickly when they're driven. And the sooner they warm up, the sooner they reach maximum efficiency and deliver the best fuel economy and performance. But don't rev the engine high over the first few miles while it's warming up.

by Consumer Reports |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument Expanded

[ed. Good news! Bad news!]

US President Barack Obama has vastly increased marine protection in the Pacific by declaring 1 million square kilometres of ocean part of a giant marine reserve.

Obama’s declaration on 25 September increased from 210,000 square kilometres to 1.3 million km2 the size of the protected area around a group of small islands in the central Pacific, stretching from Wake Atoll to Jarvis Island. This makes the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument (PRINM), originally created by former president George W. Bush, one of the largest marine protected areas in the world. Thousands of sea birds, turtles, sharks and other marine life will now be fully protected from commercial, if not from recreational, fishing over this extended area.

The expansion was not as large as some researchers and conservationists were hoping. It had been suggested that the reserve could have been expanded by 1.8 million km2, and the scale-down seems to be a concession to the tuna fishing industry, which is active in the region.

Still, the expansion means Obama has put more of the planet under protection than has any other world leader, says Elliott Norse, chief scientist at the Marine Conservation Institute, a non-governmental organization in Seattle, Washington, that has played a central part in the creation and expansion of PRIMNM.

by Daniel Cressey, Nature | Read more:
Image:USFWS

Jane Maxwell, 3 Walking Girls
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The Woman’s Heart Attack

In medical circles, they call it the Hollywood Heart Attack. You’ve seen it: grimace of agony, clutching of chest, sudden collapse, the whole purple-prose panoply.

For my husband, Harold Lear, a doctor who became a patient just that suddenly, it was the first stop in a five-year medical odyssey, one cardiac crisis after another, ending with the ultimate stop in 1978.

Through all the years that followed, it remained my assumption that the Hollywood Heart Attack was it: the paradigm, the norm, the way heart attacks are supposed to happen.

I was relieved of this assumption two years ago, when I had one of my own.

Mine went like this: altogether well one moment, vaguely unwell the next; fluttery sensation at the sternum, rising into the throat; mild chest pressure; then chills, sudden nausea, vomiting, some diarrhea. No high drama, just a mixed bag of somethings that added up to nothing you could name. Maybe flu, maybe a bad mussel, maybe too much wine, but the chest pressure caused me to say to my second husband, “Could this be a heart attack?” “Of course not,” he said. “It’s a stomach bug.”

Still, that pressure, slight but there, nagged at me. I called my doctor and reported my symptoms. The mention of diarrhea, almost never a presenting symptom in heart attacks, skewed the picture. He said, “It doesn’t sound like your heart. I can’t say a thousand percent that it’s not, but it doesn’t seem necessary to go racing to the emergency room with the way you feel now. Just see it through and come in for an EKG in the morning.”

The pressure eased. I slept, and woke the next morning feeling well. I went for the test mainly because I had said that I would, fully expecting to be told that I was healthy. First the EKG and then the echocardiogram told a different story: a substantial heart attack, “less than massive,” my doctor said, “but more than mild.” We were both stunned.

Suddenly I found myself living in a sequel: same hospital where Hal had worked and died, same coronary unit, same cardiologist, same everything; different husband wheeling me in my wheelchair through the corridors where I had wheeled Hal in his. Ghosts in every corner.

With a stent implanted in an occluded artery, I recovered fast and was cleared to leave in four days, but a bad hospital-acquired infection kept me there four weeks — time enough for a revelatory education about women and hearts.

Surprise No. 1: The biggest killer of American women is not breast cancer, as many people believe. It is heart disease. Should I have been surprised? Of course not. The American Heart Association keeps telling us about our hearts and we keep not listening, possibly because we are so fearful of cancer that we have no fear to spare, as we lie on our beds dutifully palpating ourselves for the lumps that we pray not to find.

Our hearts kill more of us than all kinds of cancer combined.

Surprise No. 2: I learn that Hal’s attack and mine are textbook illustrations of how vivid the gender differences can be. I learn that men more typically have “crushing” pain; women, nausea. That women are likelier to have early warning signs, such as unaccustomed fatigue or insomnia (unaccustomed: That’s the key word here). That we are likelier — this spooked me and kept me, for months, glued to calendars — to die within a year of a heart attack. That our symptoms can be so varied and nuanced that we feel no fear, seek no help, and possibly die — which may be why, although more men have heart attacks, a greater percentage of women die of them. (...)

Until shockingly recently — in fact, until this millennium — there was minimal research on women’s heart attacks because of widespread belief in the medical community that women did not have heart attacks. (When the American Heart Association introduced its Prudent Diet in the 1950s, it issued a pamphlet titled “The Way to a Man’s Heart.”

Research studies commonly used all-male subjects. Men with abnormal test results were treated far more aggressively than women with the same results. Women reporting the same symptoms as men were at least twice as likely to receive — no surprise here — a psychiatric diagnosis.

In a 1996 national survey of doctors, two-thirds were unaware of gender differences in symptoms and warning signs of heart attacks.

by Martha Weinman Lear, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Rachel Levit

Oyster Run 2014

[ed. I love it when this sleepy little town goes insane one day each year (for the last 33 years). Tens of thousands of bikers pour in to celebrate everything bike-related. It's the annual Oyster Run (here are a few photos from my first OR).  Always a great time.]

photos: markk

Byron Barrett, Rush Hour, 2009
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When Blogging Becomes a Slog

[ed. Sometimes you're inspired, sometimes you're not. It must be grueling to produce original content every day. Much of what you see on the web today is derivative, so even with curation/aggregation blogs like this one, it takes time to separate the wheat from the chaff. But, since revenue generation has never been an issue here, no worries. Our motto: all the news you need, whenever we feel like printing it.]

Is the first generation of design bloggers aging out of the blogosphere? Or is this just a new twist on an old business story, updated for the Internet age?

Pam Kueber, the midcentury design expert behind the blog Retro Renovation, is 55, and she sees the Petersiks’ escalating stress levels and unhappiness simply as evidence of the latter: A passion turns into a hobby, which becomes a full-time career. “And in some predictable period of time, it consumes your life and sucks the joy out if it,” said Ms. Kueber, finishing the arc. “That last part of the Shakespearean tragedy is what you have to be mindful of not letting happen.”

A tricky thing to avoid as a full-time blogger, considering that the Internet never sleeps, readers want fresh content daily and new social media platforms must be mastered and added to the already demanding workload. Add to that the economic challenges of blogging full time. As Grace Bonney of Design Sponge lamented earlier this year in a “State of the Blog Union,” advertising rates have dropped significantly because advertisers are flooded with options.

To earn money, many bloggers have had to embrace sponsored content, breeding distrust among readers. Several Young House Love readers, for instance, thought the giveaways were product placements in disguise, even though the Petersiks maintained they weren’t compensated for doing them.

“If readers begin to suspect that your content is heavy on product placement, if they see excessive amounts of sponsored posts, you risk losing what’s most important, which is trust and authenticity,” said Ms. Kueber, who still relies largely on banner ads and has so far done only two sponsored posts.

And blogs that focus on the home come with their own particular set of challenges. Unlike a personal style blog, in which generating new content can be as simple as getting dressed in the morning, producing a decorating or D.I.Y. blog involves considerable time, expense and domestic upheaval. (...)

The Petersiks were early adopters of the blog format and hardly could have anticipated the success and opportunities that would result from telling strangers about redoing the dreary den of their starter home. But from the outset, the couple forged an intimate bond with their audience that went beyond fix-it projects. When they staged their D.I.Y. wedding in the backyard in 2007, they posted an album’s worth of photos, complete with a cost breakdown (cupcakes and s’mores: $125). And when Ms. Petersik had life-threatening complications during the birth of their first child, she shared the emotional story online.

The couple also worked tirelessly. Barely had they finished one total home redo when they bought another fixer-upper and then a third, as if they were trapped on a house-jumping hamster wheel by the need to generate blog content. Last November, the couple posted a to-do list for their latest home, a stately brick four-bedroom with a showcase lawn. If you print the list, it runs to 20 pages. You could exhaust yourself just reading it.

Erin Loechner, who publishes the blog Design for Mankind, said that professional bloggers like herself take on very demanding, self-imposed workloads. “I think there’s a fear that if we post less, our readers will find that content elsewhere,” she said. And yet many bloggers don’t want to complain for fear of sounding whiny or ungrateful.

by Steven Kurutz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Michelle Litvin

Marco Battaglini, Gentlemen prefer blondes
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Ello, Goodbye

[ed. See also: What is Ello and Should I Even Bother?]

Here’s how venture capital works: you go to an investor, before you’ve even built the thing you’re building and you tell them how you’re going to exit. It’s called an exit plan or exit strategy. You tell them, for example: “Hey, we’re going to get 100 million people using our new platform in two years time, how much will you give me for 100 million people?” And they go “Umm, we’ll give you this much for 100 million people because we’re pretty sure we can get that amount back several times over when we sell those 100 million people in an exit either to another company or in an IPO.”

When you take venture capital, it is not a matter of if you’re going to sell your users, you already have. It’s called an exit plan. And no investor will give you venture capital without one. In the myopic and upside-down world of venture capital, exits precede the building of the actual thing itself. It would be a comedy if the repercussions of this toxic system were not so tragic.

Let me put it bluntly: if a company has taken venture capital, you have already been sold. It’s not a matter of if, it’s simply a matter of when. (Unless the company goes under before it can exit, that is.)

A venture-capital funded startup is a temporary company that has to convince enough people into using their platform so that they can make good on the exit they promised their investors at the very beginning. It is the opposite of a long-term, sustainable business.

by Aral Balkan |  Read more:

Image: Ello