| My guess is that a big reason a lot of people fail is due to the way food is marketed and sold. For example, the Extra Long Cheeseburger at Burger King is $3.99. They are currently running a deal, though, 2 for $5. A lot of people who go in there and want to eat a single Extra Long Cheeseburger are going to see that and say "No freaking way am I paying $3.99 for one, when I can get TWO for $5". We have a natural tendency to compare per unit pricing, and see it as buying just one means paying $3.99 per unit, but going for the 2 for $5 means just $2.50 unit, and we tend to see the regular price as a rip-off compared to the sale price. Yes, this is not rational, but this is how people work. Similar thing with Subway, which ran a deal where most foot long subs were $6 all February. That made it real hard for many people who normally bought a 6" to do so. When your normal 6" is $5.89, and you can double the size for an extra $0.11, it is very very hard to stay at 6". Another good illustration was an experiment I saw. The experimenters got to play with the pricing and availability of drinks in a movie theater. The theater normally sold a small drink for something like $1, and a large for something like $3. The large was much larger than the small, but the small (which was still kind of big) was by far the best seller. So then they added a medium, that was about 25% of the way between the small and large in size, but cost something like $2.75. Note that objectively the medium is a terrible choice. It cost 2.75 times as much as the small for only 25% of the soda, and it only cost $0.25 less than the large but gave much less soda. So guess what happened? No, people did not buy the medium...but now most people bought the large! I'm not sure exactly where I saw this one. I think it might have been on the National Geographic channel, on the show "Brain Games". If not, it was on a similar show on the Science Channel or one of the other Discovery network channels. Psychologists and behavioral economists have learned a lot about how we make purchasing decisions, and the marketing departments of probably every major (and a lot of minor) food companies follow that work closely and put it into practice. Most of us don't have a chance against that. |
I know it is just a kids movie, but the world in Wall-E a Disney movie from 2008, is terrifyingly realistic now, and I thought it was at least sort of a joke.(For anyone not familiar, Wall-E is an animated movie portraying a "kid friendly" dystopian future where the humans are all really fat, can barely move, have abandoned earth for a space station, and robots do everything for them. They have hovering chairs and perform no physical exercise and earth is basically a wasteland full of trash. The protagonist is a trash collecting robot on earth that accidentally brings a plant, of which there previously were none, onto the spaceship the humans live on causing the plot to drive forward)
I now think the autonomous car, ultra marketed, consumer society we are building actually ends up very close to this.