The Wisdom Of The Cronut: Why Long
Lines Are Worth the Wait
Would you wait 2 hours for a pastry?
Imagine, if you will, the
"Cronut." This sugar-rolled, cream-filled, glaze-topped
doughnut-croissant hybrid has been taking Manhattan by storm since being rolled
out by the Dominique Ansel bakery in May. The bakery only makes about 200-250
Cronuts a day, at $5 a pop--far fewer than it could sell in a given day, as
evidenced by the behavior of its customers.
On its website, the bakery gives
instructions for winning the privilege of buying a coveted Cronut.
Specifically, customers are encouraged to line up two hours prior to the
bakery's usual opening time of 8 a.m. They are warned that they will only be
allowed to purchase two Cronuts per person, and they are asked not to do
business with Cronut scalpers. That's right, scalpers: So feverish has the
craving for Cronuts become that customers reportedly have been known to pull up
in their cars and buy the pastries from line-waiters at a $30 markup.
The Cronut craze may sound like
another tale of New York City excess. Yet most of us have experienced the agony
of waiting in a long line for the latest gadget, a hot new movie, or a table at
a favorite restaurant. Whatever awaits us on the other side, we tell ourselves
that standing on our aching feet for an hour or longer will be worth it.
At first glance, such long lines
seem to make little sense from the seller's standpoint. Dominique Ansel says
it's working to increase the number of Cronuts produced each day, but again,
why the wait? After all, the recipe should be easy to scale up. In fact,
standard economic theory suggests that supply should match demand. When a
product is popular, why not make it more easily available?
Joe Marks, then Disney's vice
president of research, asked himself this question a few years ago when he
visited Tokyo Disneyland and was puzzled by a particular behavior he observed
there. Park visitors were standing in line, often for many hours at a time,
outside a shop in the park's Frontierland. Marks found out that the customers
were waiting to buy an inexpensive (less than $10) leather bracelet on which
they could have a name painted or embossed. Marks wondered why the bracelets
were in such demand, and, even more important, why other stores in the park
weren't selling the same bracelets. Surely, Disney could improve visitors'
experience by reducing their wait time! In Marks' mind, the company needed to
make the popular product more easily available.
As it turned out, Marks' intuition
was way off. The visitors he observed usually were standing in line with their
sweetheart or spouse. The couples' willingness to patiently wait for the
bracelet was a signal of their strong commitment to each other--for, according
to a Japanese tradition, exchanging leather bracelets is a sign of bonding. It
was the very act of waiting for the bracelet that made the product so popular.
Waiting in line signaled to other park visitors that their commitment to their
romantic partners was exceptionally strong.
In the same way, the painful morning
wait for Cronuts is likely to be contributing to the product's popularity. The
fact that people are waiting signals to others that they too should be in on
the trend.
Psychologists and behavioral
decision scientists refer to this type of behavior as
"self-signaling"--that is, making decisions that communicate to
ourselves the type of person we view ourselves to be. Although we tend to
believe we have an accurate understanding of who we are and what we like, in
reality, we often don't have a clear sense of our own preferences. To figure
them out, we observe our own behavior.
Our daily lives provide many
opportunities for self-signaling. Imagine that you are approaching a homeless
person who is asking for money. You could ignore him, you could give him some
change, or you might even buy him a coffee. How do you think you would feel
about yourself if you bought coffee for him and he gratefully accepted it? In
all likelihood, you would feel proud of yourself. The act of buying the man a
coffee would not change who you are fundamentally, but it would provide you
with evidence that you are a generous, caring, and altruistic person. That's
self-signaling--and, since behaviors carry more weight in our minds than mere
words do, you are now likely to believe you are a person of high integrity.
Consider another example of the
power of self-signaling from an amusing experiment that the psychologists
George Quattrone and Amos Tversky conducted in the early 1980s. They welcomed
participants to their lab for a study about the "psychological and medical
aspects of athletics." The experimenter informed the participants that the
purpose of the study was "to examine the effects of rapid changes in
temperature on heart rate after exercise." They then were asked to engage
in a simple task: to hold their arm in ice water for as long as they could (an
experience that becomes painful within just a few seconds.) After the ice water
task, the participants had their pulse taken, then spent one minute pedaling a
stationary bicycle. This was the first trial of the experiment.
For the second trial, they engaged
in another ice water task and pulse reading. The first trial established a
baseline heart rate in response to temperature change; the second measured
heart rate in response to temperature change following exercise. The task was
structured to mirror the situation of an athlete jumping into a cold shower
after exercising on a hot summer day.
Here's where things get interesting.
After the participants had gone through the first trial, the experiment told
some of them that high pain tolerance is an indicator of a healthy heart. This
information was convincing enough to lead these participants to keep their arms
under water during the second trial for longer than they had during the first
trial. Meanwhile, other participants were told after the first trial that low,
rather than high, pain tolerance is a signal of good health. Members of this
group kept their arms under water for a much shorter amount of time than they
had before receiving this information.
Clearly, participants interpreted
the length of time they kept their arms under water (whether long or short) as
a sign of their healthiness. Of course, they were wrong; their heart health had
been already established by Mother Nature and their lifestyle choices. Once
again, self-signaling was at work.
We have all been in the position of
trying in vain to make sense of the behavior of a colleague, boss, spouse or
peer. But even behaviors that seem irrational--such as waiting in line in the
early morning hours for a Cronut--begin to make sense when we think about the
signals they send to ourselves.
By: Francesca Gino
http://www.fastcompany.com/3013742/the-wisdom-of-the-cronut-why-long-lines-are-worth-the-wait?partner=newsletter
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