MBA2269 Bonus Episode: You’re going to love The Hustle Daily Show

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So let me paint a scene for you here. It's 2015. We're at a costco in Southern California, the epicenter of chill vibes. It's just before 11am and the free samples are out in full swing. You've got the tables with people hocking crackers and nuts and smoked meats and all of a sudden this brawl breaks.

Yeah, this 78 year old guy is there at the table helping himself to quite a few free samples of Nutella waffles, which sound absolutely delightful by the way. And someone who's quite a bit younger, in his 20s is not having it and he tells the guy to stop hoarding so many samples and they get into a little bit of an argument and then all of a sudden the 20 something guy punches the 78 year old in the face.

Is there bloodshed?

Oh yes, there's bloodshed. There's a hospital visit, there's an arrest, There's a lot of news stories on the local TV stations in California.

This is all over a free sample.

Yeah, it was just those Nutella waffles.

Okay, so this may seem odd, right, that a few small free samples on toothpicks can do something like incite violence, but this conduct is really rooted in behavioral psychology. And as it turns out, free stuff makes us do very strange things. I'm Zachary Crockett.

And I'm Mark Dent. This is the Hustle Daily Show.

And today we are taking a look at how getting stuff for free affects consumer behavior. And to really get at the heart of the story here, we're going to focus on three wildly different areas. Free grocery store samples, free shipping and online content. And really free affects all of these arenas in very different ways. But I guess to start, I'll ask you a question, mark. What is it about the word free that drives us nuts and makes us do this stuff? You talked to a couple influential behavioral psychologists and economists about this? Yeah.

Kind of like you were saying, when something becomes free, it's like all bets are off. Any sort of normal type of consumer behavior changes. It just goes completely off the charts to where something that might seem totally irrational in kind of any other situation now feels. It feels normal and you're going to start doing it. And obviously that fight was like a pretty crazy example. But like there's this one study that is seen as the sort of like ultimate gauge of what your behavior is like when you see something that's free. And this happened at like a really prestigious university in their cafeteria. And Dan Ariely, Dan Ariely is a pretty well known behavioral economist and a couple of other researchers, they started having some chocolates in this cafeteria and for one study, they had Hershey's kisses that cost one penny, and they had Lindt truffles for 14 cents.

A far superior chocolate.

Yeah, like, people pay a lot of money for those things. So 14 cents is like a really good deal.

Right.

And one cent for a Hershey's Kiss is, you know, maybe kind of a good deal, but pretty average, I would say. And so, not surprisingly, the Lindt truffle wins out big time. Roughly three times, almost four times as many people choose to pay 14 cents for that, over one cent for the Hershey's Kiss. But here is there we get this crazy, irrational thing about free stuff. They decide to make the Hershey's Kiss free when they do the experiment again because they dropped that price by $0.01. They also dropped the Lindt truffle price by $0.01, so it's now $0.13. And this time, the Hershey's Kiss for free is way more popular. More than twice as many people pick the Hershey's Kiss as they do the Lindt truffle, even though it's not as good, but it's free. That's what matters.

Wow. So first study. The Hershey's kiss is $0.01. Overwhelmingly, people go with the Lindtruffle. And then essentially the same pricing, except the Hershey Kiss is free. And overwhelmingly, people pick the kiss. Just a $0.01 difference.

There's no difference in the price at all. And it's not like it was one of those special dark Hershey's Kisses or, you know, the one that has, like, white chocolate mixed with it and is somehow a little bit nicer.

Right, right. Yeah.

It's the same thing, the same Hershey's Kiss.

There's no.

No extra utility derived from that Hershey's Kiss. It's the same piece of crappy chocolate.

Yeah. And they even set up the experiment so that like, like, at first they worried if there was some sort of, like, bias that would creep in, because when something is free, you don't have to reach for your wallet. Right. Which is kind of like, you know, it saves you a little bit of effort if something is free. But they even had it set out so that that was not an effect. Right. They were sitting there at the end of the counter for people who were already buying things, you know, so, like, they were already buying some sort item from the cafeteria, so they already had their wallet out.

Right. Sure. So what does Ariely conclude here?

So they came up with something called the zero price effect. They kind of coined that term and what it really means is that people overvalue things that are free and they make irrational decisions when something free is involved. And one of the other co authors of that study, Christina Champenier, was telling me that the behavior is irrational because the participants who picked that free Hershey's Kiss, they gave up something that was better. Something that they would almost certainly prefer in a traditional cost benefit analysis.

Sure.

So like in life, we're making these cost benefit analyses every day, and when you throw in this extra variable of something that's free, they just go haywire.

So tell me if I have this right. An example of this playing out in the real world would be like, let's say you see, you know, a crappy low quality T shirt at a store for 20 bucks. Most people are just going to walk by and, you know, feel the fabric and say, eh, I don't know, that's not worth 20 bucks. They just continue on with their day. But if that same exact T shirt is like, you know, launched out of a cannon at a baseball game into the crowd, you're going to have like 20 dudes fighting over it, spilling beer all over each other and causing mayhem just to get their hands on that T shirt.

And potentially maybe hundreds of people, not even just 20.

Right.

They're always wondering, like, why don't you aim the cannon at me? Why not the upper deck?

Right, right.

That's like exactly what it is. There's something that is of not necessarily that much value, but just, you know, smack the word free on it. Christina Champonier, one of these co authors, was saying that there's like this glow that we attach to it. That was like the word that she used, like this positive glow. That's almost like a high. Like your mind is just not clear in some sort of way. You know, just like kind of it is with a traditional high, I suppose.

So we're under kind of a trance, a spell, like a free stuff spell. And when we're in this kind of trance, we don't really see the downsides of what we're getting for free.

Yeah. The downside in the Hershey's Kiss case would be like, you're actually passing up something of value. Right. You know, they were passing up the opportunity to have a lint truffle that is more delicious, more expensive, typically because of that free thing. And they're giving that up.

Right.

And the T shirt is maybe a little bit different. Maybe you're kind of giving up your dignity, I guess, like when you're just like jostling for that thing, you essentially don't realize that what you're doing has some sort of probably cost to it, you know, because you just think it's free.

You know, there's, there's like free stuff all around us every day, especially in E commerce. You looked at free shipping as one arena where the word free is used very liberally. But what you're finding here is free shipping is kind of a good example of not really being able to see those downsides. Is that right?

Yeah, people, they are obsessed with free shipping. There was like a 2019 survey that showed 77% of over a thousand participants said that free shipping was what made them more likely to buy an item online, more so than free returns. Same day shipping. So fast shipping even wasn't all that important. It was just like getting this sort of free thing was the thing that drove people to actually buy something online more than almost any other factor. It obviously makes some sense, right? Like, hey, it's free shipping that helps you out. But the problem is that people oftentimes don't realize that whether it's like different companies or, you know, people who are just kind of selling things online individually will often jack up the price of the product because they are offering free shipping. And so the free thing obscures the fact that you're paying a premium price. I know you've kind of looked into this, Zach. Free shipping to me seems like this really dodgy, maybe halfway version of like a buy one, get one free. You know, totally is.

Yeah, the free shipping thing totally reminds me of buy one, get one free deal. So we've all gone to the store and, you know, let's say it's a pair of jeans or something at Levi's and you buy one, you get one free. Seems like a great deal. But what's often happening behind the scenes in those kind of promotions is that you're really just getting 50% off of the MSRP, the rack price. An example that an economist gave me a few years ago was, let's say a retailer has a surplus of jeans. It costs them $20 per pair to acquire them and to make them. And they sell them for $100 each, right? So $20 cost, they sell them for 100 bucks. Now if they run a standard 50% off sale, just one pair of jeans, 50% off. So they buy it for 20 to sell it for 50 bucks, they make $30 on that one pair of jeans. But with a BOGO, what often happens is they'll just sell that first pair of jeans for $100. They'll keep that price up at MSRP and you'll get one free. But the retailer is actually making $60. They're making a $30 profit on each pair of jeans. In that case, they're passing it off as if they're giving you this crazy deal. But it's not really a crazy deal. They're still winning. And now you have two pairs of pants when you only really needed one. So there's a social waste element to it as well. But the point being, you're right. There are all these hidden costs when things are free.

Yeah. And it's like in that kind of example, you're giving people, they feel like they're saving, though. You know what I mean?

Sure.

And so it becomes worth it for them, which again, is not necessarily rational, but it is something that feels good. You know, for instance, to go back to the shipping thing, there was a study done over at Wharton University of Pennsylvania where consumers preferred to save $7 and get free shipping versus saving $10 off the purchase price and still pay for shipping. So they're really like, flat out saying, I would rather pay a little bit more, as long as something feels free. We'll maybe get into some good buy one, get one. Examples that you have here. I think there's definitely, like, this sort of positive glow we've been talking about, but I think there's also a practical element to it as well, where I think people do also sometimes not really understand what these extra costs should be and what they maybe should be paying for and not paying for. So, like, with shipping, for instance, they know it's normal to pay for this tangible product, but they don't necessarily see the cost that goes into shipping. Right. Like, there's a whole bunch of costs associated. You have to have someone drive it to your door, you have to have it probably be flown on an airplane somewhere, etc. And it's really hard to think of those as costs that you want to pay for. And you're just like, screw all that. Like, why would I need to pay for free shipping? And that also, I think, gets into it.

Yeah, that's totally true. There's like this fallacy that we have as consumers that the price we're paying is just for the good itself. But even long before E Commerce, long before you went online and bought that pair of jeans on Amazon or whatever, if you go to a brick and mortar store and you buy, let's say, a pair of pants, part of what you're paying for is the trucking and the shipping to get that there. And, you know, it goes beyond the. Obviously the cost of the good itself. But like you said, those prices just aren't a transparent part of the pricing model and we don't often see them.

Yeah, and it's like you wouldn't really know unless you actually are someone who has like their own e commerce store or something like that. If you were to ask me, like, how much does it cost to ship a pair of jeans across the country? I'd be like, I have no idea. I wouldn't know if it was like five bucks or if it was like 15. I really wouldn't. Yeah, it's probably closer to five or seven maybe, but I don't know. I do know it's very expensive if you ship it overseas basically no matter what. But yeah, it's just something that's so far outside of most people's minds what that thing should cost. So you're just like, it better be free.

Right. I think that lack of knowledge really plays into why we fall prey to the word free. I remember one economist with buy one, get one free deals just telling me buy one, get one free deals are kind of like quasi legitimate, maybe not so legitimate deals. And they really rely on consumers not paying a lot of attention to what they're doing. It just rests on the assumption that we don't know those costs and we don't know what goes into commerce. And we just wander in and we are suddenly under the spell of this one word.

Right. And you can totally be taken advantage of. You wrote about how there were like 150 lawsuits just over the last few years over free promotions. And some of these are just like, pretty awful, frankly. Very scammy.

Right. So, yeah, I'll give you a few examples here. Burger King, years ago, they offered a buy one, get one free croissanwich deal. Never knew that was a thing. But anyway, in this deal, they charged a higher price for the sandwich than it regularly cost. So the sandwich regularly cost about 216. They charged $3.15. They charged an entire dollar more for the sandwich for the buy one, get one free. So, yes, you got one for free, but you paid significantly more for the first one. Mypillow, this infamous pillow company that's now, you know, obviously under a lot of scrutiny for its affiliations in recent years. They offered a buy one, get one free deal on their pillows, but they jacked up the price on the first pillow by 2x. So you paid double the price for the first pillow.

So that One was literally not a deal at all.

It's literally just like buying two pillows from them. It's the same thing. Vision works. They offered a buy one, get one free deal on eyeglasses, but it turned out they'd increased the price of the first pair of glasses by 40%. So, you know, a lot of companies have been caught. This is actually considered deceptive marketing for inflating the price of the first good, that you get to basically cover the cost of the second, quote unquote free item. You know, in short, in some of these more nefarious situations, you're not getting anything for free. You're paying for it. It's baked into the price.

It's like what you exactly were saying. No one has any clue, frankly, what a pillow probably normally costs. So they're just like, oh, buy one, get one free. They're like, oh, yeah, all right. Yeah, 12 bucks. That makes sense. And also, like, go. God bless the people who filed these lawsuits, because it means that they did such great homework to Burger King. They were like, you know what? I swear to God, I knew it said $2.16 on this menu like a month ago, and somehow went up and looked that up. And I love that.

When I think of free shipping, I immediately think Amazon, they completely revolutionized the game with free shipping. They normalized free shipping. They made it an expectation rather than just an extra perk.

Yeah, absolutely. They have, of course, their prime program, which makes most free shipping wise. And they've been, like, experimenting with it going back to the time when Jeff Bezos was, like, appearing in Taco Bell commercials. You know what I mean? Like in the. In, like the late 90s and such. Yeah, at that time, they were trying out free shipping in different countries, and in France, they reduced it, you know, at least at the study I saw, to one franc. This was like, during that really weird time when the euro had not quite been switched over for currency yet for France. So this really cheap amount for shipping, but not quite free. And so what they saw in France was that sales didn't rise all that dramatically compared to some other countries where they did offer free shipping. It was such a hook. It led to people buying those things. And, you know, we're talking about not being able to see what things actually cost. So therefore you think free is a good deal or, like, even something necessary to have. I really just think Amazon prime is like a perfect instance of that, too. You pay this flat fee every year, and it's unclear if it's really going to be Worth it for you, Right? Because again, we really don't know how much shipping actually costs on a given item. And so you just think, oh, well, I'll pay this. And I'm sure it'll make sense for me in the long run because everything says free on it when you go to check out.

So, you know, in short, here, with free shipping, most of the time, the cost is just baked in to what you're paying anyway. They're using free shipping. They're touting it as this big benefit that you're getting, but it's really just baked into the price at the end of the day in most cases. Now, you looked into a different area here. Let's take it back to free samples. We talked about the brawl that emerged in that Costco at the beginning of this podcast, but a lot of stores like Costco that have these free sample models. I think one question everybody has is, you know, there's got to be some catch here. What are the stores getting out of giving all this stuff away for free?

Right. Like, we've been kind of talking so far about how free it gives you this glow. It kind of, you know, makes you act a little bit irrational. It kind of like obscures certain costs that may actually be involved to the point where you actually may not get that good of a deal on something that's free. Throw all those ingredients in there. And then on top of that, as Dan Ariely told me, something that's free usually makes you want to, like, do something nice in return.

Oh, really?

Because someone essentially did something for you, so you want to do something for them. And what that means for stores like Costco is that when those Nutella waffles there are, you know, on a toothpick for you, and, you know, A, they taste delicious, so you might want to buy them, but B, you got them for free, so you might want to buy them, it kind of catalyzes you into going that extra step and, you know, paying five bucks for them or whatever because you got it for free.

So there is a monetary payoff here.

Yeah, and there's like, pretty good data about this, actually. I mean, what we've seen is that frozen pizza, there's a 600% average annual percentage increase in sales after you have that in free sample demonstrations.

Wow.

I mean, that's easily the craziest one. But with lipstick. I mean, think Sephora, right? Where there's a ton of free makeup samples there, 540%, 310% for wine and cheese, it's 103% beer, 71% gain. I would love to know why wine? It's 310% and only 71% for beer.

But I don't know, maybe more economists drink beer or something.

That is a study there.

Yeah. So this kind of explained wineries giving out free wine flights or something. You feel indebted to them and actually in a lot of these free sample cases leads to massive increases in sales for what ultimately amounts to a pretty minimal input cost. I think you dug up some 2011 data that showed that the average demonstration company for one day at a grocery store might be something like 150, 400 bucks something in there.

Yeah, it's definitely not cheap, but usually it returns. It's a good investment. Otherwise people wouldn't do it. Of course. And like we were just saying, this is an old stat from a few years ago, but add up every company that wants to like hire someone to do their free samples and has them at the different stores and whatnot, and it's a $2 billion a year industry. $2 billion is spent to give people free stuff in hopes that they will reciprocate back. And they do. And you know, we've been talking about irrationality and whatnot, but I think like this part of the equation, to me at least, is like a little bit less rational to some degree.

Right.

If you get something for free, you want to do something back. I think it's more of like a nice side of human nature to some extent, even though we're still talking about spending and money and business.

All right, so free shipping comes with ancillary costs that are baked in that you don't see free samples. You have this feeling that you need to reciprocate. And maybe, yes, you get that Nutella sample for free, but you end up spending, I don't know, 20 bucks on like three jars of Nutella or something in return for that. There's a third arena, and this is dramatically different. But how do we think about free in the digital ecosystem with content where everything is just expected to be free and we have this overwhelming pits of free content everywhere we look.

I wanted to look into this because a, like you said, stuff online is free, right? There's a lot of free news sites, free social media sites, et cetera. And on top of that, usually the different types of services that do charge you for, like content on the Internet, they'll typically give you a freebie, right? They'll give you maybe three or four free articles per month on like the New York Times or If you subscribe to somebody's substack newsletter, even those that are premium, they generally, they'll give you, like, one free article a week or something like that. So they are more or less doing what Costco is. They're giving you something free, hoping to entice you to buy something. And I know, Zach, you and I have talked about different news subscriptions and how expensive they are, but, you know, the New York Times is roughly, I don't know, I think 10 bucks a month or 8 bucks a month or something like that. So that's what they're hoping you'll shell out. Right. If you get a couple of things for free. I asked Dan Ariely about this, and he said no. Like, that whole feeling of reciprocation, it does not apply.

That doesn't carry over to content on the Internet.

No. If you just look at the numbers, like, you can kind of see why, according to the Reuters Institute's digital News report for 2020, only about 20% of Americans pay for online news. And I mean, that's really not that much. Obviously, some subscription publications are doing very well, but only a couple. You know, you know, the New York Times being one Washington Post, some more niche kind of websites as well. And you can just tell it, people don't want to pay for it. You know, whenever I see, like, some journalist post something on Twitter, like this huge investigative report, usually, like, the first replies are like, I can't read this. It's behind a paywall.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so why is this, though? It's unlike the food, where we've been conditioned to knowing that we must pay for food for, like, centuries, at least, maybe even eons. You know, if you think of, like, bartering and whatnot, that's not really the case with the Internet. When the Internet really came of age over the last 25, 30 years, there's been more of an expectation that things are free.

Right.

So you don't feel like you have to reciprocate because you expect that it is going to be free. Facebook, it's free. Twitter is free.

Yeah. And something like 4 in 10Americans say that they would never pay for news.

Yeah, exactly.

So that one in five sliver may stay pretty small for a while. Of the people who aren't paying, 40% of them have no interest in starting.

Yeah. And to, like, bring this all full circle. What's most fascinating, I think, about people not wanting to pay for news or social media or something like that is that free content isn't necessarily a good deal. It Takes us back to like the irrationality of free stuff. Because, say you're on Facebook, we all know you get bombarded with ads, targeted ads for that matter. And because it is dependent on this one sort of revenue model, as they say, you know, sometimes when something is free, you're the customer.

Right.

And that's certainly the case with social media. So people who have this free service that they're like, yes, yes, it's free, I would never pay for this. They might be clicking on one of those targeted ads and they might be buying something that they don't really want and spending money that way. And the same is true with news sites where there's a lot of ads on a lot of those. And for some kind of news websites, they're not very high quality websites, so your experience isn't very good. So there's all these kind of costs again, that people are overlooking because something is free and they just are like, yeah, free, free, give me free. And they don't think about the other costs that they're paying in the long run.

Yeah. And you know, you could even make the case that the costs of free content are higher than the costs of hidden costs of something like free shipping. The things we are giving away on the Internet are actually very highly valued.

Right.

We're often giving away vast swaths of our personal data just to access a website. You know, you should enter your personal information or something to get access to a free site that's not free. People are behind the scenes brokering your data on data brokering websites. Your data enters this kind of intractable stream of where it gets disseminated to all different types of parties. You get signed up for newsletters, you get junk mail, you get phone calls. I guess the adage that nothing is free really is true in this case.

Like you said, you're giving up your information. And in some ways I think that you're also perhaps giving up your time. In some ways, right, It's a free service. You're just going to be on it all the time. Perhaps like how some people are with social media. There's just so many different costs.

And I'm sure, you know, if everything is free and available at any given time, we're going to have less reservations about interacting and spending more time on those platforms. That's a huge waste of time. It kind of gets at this other concept of diminishing marginal utility too. You know, the easiest way to think about this is if you buy a whole pizza and you're really hungry, the first Slice is going to be incredible. You're going to bite into it and say, this is the best damn pizza I've ever had in my life. Second piece, pretty damn good.

Yeah.

Third piece, maybe still pretty good. Fourth piece, fifth piece, whatever. You know, by the fifth, sixth piece, depending on your appetite, it's going to start not tasting as good. By the seventh and eighth piece, you're going to be very full. You're going to start wishing you didn't have any pizza left. If you get it to like 9, 10, 11, 12 range, whatever, you're probably going to throw up. The further you go, the less utility, the less value you're getting out of each slice. And I often think about how this plays into content on the Internet. You know, the first 20 minutes browsing Twitter might yield some funny or interesting things.

Oh, yes.

But the longer you stay on, the more toxic it is. Yeah.

When I am like, logging on Twitter for the first time in the day, I'm kind of like, okay, now I kind of remember why I'm addicted to this. But, you know, then by 3 o' clock in the afternoon, you feel like you are ready to just go into a corner and just look at, like a blank wall for, you know, an hour, basically, because it would feel better than looking at Twitter for even two more minutes. It is truly all around us. And there obviously is content that we do pay for, right? Netflix, Hulu, et cetera. So it's so malleable in a way, Right. Some content we see as having value worth paying for, some we don't. And these extra costs that you incur, I think, because you don't really realize that there is actually value in that. And so someone else has figured out a way to make value off of that content and they're making it off of you, even though you're not paying them five bucks or whatever.

One other thing it reminds me of, this is a little bit of a tangent, but have you ever seen, like, those free cars at the mall?

Oh, yeah. When I was a child, I loved seeing those.

Yeah. So you walk into the middle of a mall, there's this like, cordoned off section and there's a shiny new Acura or whatever. And it's. It's this beautiful car parked in the middle of the mall, a huge sign above it that says free car. All you have to do is enter to win. I did an investigation a few years ago on those promotions, and it turns out that in many cases, at least the one that I entered, you basically enter this competition, you put Your name, your email, your address, your phone number, all of your data into this digital form, and you basically get entered into a timeshare competition. You get invited to all these timeshare presentations, and your data goes into this database. In the fine print of the contract, it says they can sell it and resell it and resell it and resell it to data brokers. You never get out of it. And the kicker is that there's no free car at all. In the fine print of the contract, it says the car is for display purposes only. It's not actually a part of the giveaway.

So basically, they were giving away the opportunity to be wooed by someone who has, like, a condo in the Virgin Islands or something like that.

Yeah. And the real prize was, like, a $200 gift card or something to that effect. But the only way to qualify for it was to attend all these timeshare presentations and waste, like, six hours of.

Your day, all your time.

So basically, the costs outweighed the benefits. But, you know, I feel like that's the perfect antidote to kind of summarize everything that you found in your story. It's just maybe I'm overly cynical, but maybe, truly, there is nothing for free in the world. Maybe it's just not worth it when you see that word.

Yeah, I know. Although I still get suckered in by free stuff. Here's like, a kind of a fun example. So I got married a few months ago, and we would have hired this photographer no matter what. Right. But, like, as part of the package that we paid a few thousand dollars for, they also gave us a free T shirt. And it's just like a regular white T shirt that has, like, their company logo on it. But I just. I wear it all the time. I'm like, I really like this shirt. You know, it's a cool shirt, and probably because it's free, like, I wear it all the time now.

And when you wear it, do you think, damn, I got this shirt for free?

Yeah, I mean, I totally do.

Even though you paid 2,000 bucks, basically to get this shirt?

Yes. Yeah. It was a very expensive shirt, all things considered.

Oh, man, that's funny. All right, that's going to do it for us today, folks. Thanks for tuning in to the Hustle Daily Show. We're a proud part of the HubSpot Podcast network. Our editor today is Robert Hartwig, and our executive producer is Darren Clark. We've got a lot more tech and business coverage for you in our newsletter. And if you're not subscribed to that, you can go over to the Hustle Co and get yourself subscribed. That's the Hustle Co. Catch you all tomorrow.

That was an episode of the podcast the Hustle Daily Show. There are more episodes available where you'll hear daily business and tech news in 10 minutes or less. To hear those episodes, just search the Hustle Daily show in your podcast app. That's the Hustle Daily Show.

Gas Snacks, tolls this trip is draining my wallet. Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood.

What's your deal?

What's my deal?

I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Text and data detour to Metro.

Get that more for your money feeling.

Only at Metro by T Mobile.

Just bring your number $30 first month and $25 after with autopay not available. If with Metro or T Mobile in the past 180 days.