If I offered to pay you $3.99 to go stand in a corner and do nothing for an hour and a half, would you do it?

Human psychology never ceases to amaze me:

[KFC] Restaurants summoned extra help to keep pace with the crowds, yet some customers waited an hour and a half as the chain gave away millions of the meals Tuesday, Wednesday and part of Thursday.

That is a snippet from a recent AP article about KFC’s botched marketing campaign where they, in conjunction with Oprah Winfrey, were offering a free two-piece grilled chicken meal worth $3.99. It is simply amazing how people behave under the perceptive influence of getting something free. All reason suddenly flies out the window, logic takes a vacation, and an uncivilized “horde as much as you can lest we starve” mentality from a primitive section of the brain takes over. I’m not bashing on folks who are down on their economic luck and truly need to take advantage of a free meal. I am talking about vast majority of average, free-willed people standing in line, clutching their computer-printed coupons, who could afford to think rationally about the prospect of wasting hours of their time and sanity for $3.99 worth of fast food — and even staging civil rights era-style protests when they did not get their way.

To put this in perspective: $3.99 is the price of a cheap beer at a local bar, 1/3^rd the price of a single adult admission to a movie theater, the price of a small bag of popcorn at that same movie, and only 16 minutes worth of pay for a person making $30k annually (not far above the poverty line). In perspective, $3.99 is not a lot of money. Yet we humans, time and again, completely lose perspective when offered something of even minor value for free.

We’ve seen examples of the same attitude regarding “free”, time and again. Last year people waited in line for two hours at Denny’s for a free meal worth $5.99 (that still required cash tip for the server, making its net worth even less). Every year for Black Friday, people camp out in parking lots for upwards of 8 hours — and sometimes trample others to death — to save a few dollars on retail merchandise. It’s not pretty. It’s not rational. It’s animal. It’s fascinating.

I deleted my free chicken coupon today. I’d rather go pay for my lunch.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.