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.

I received a nice pair of Bushnell binoculars as a gift several years ago. They ended up in a drawer, unused, and still packaged. I found them recently and was dismayed to discover that a manufacturing defect caused a vertical misalignment of the images in the left left and right lenses, for which there was no adjustment. The effect on the brain after looking through them was the opposite of Advil. Fortuitously, I found a limited lifetime warranty and proceeded to ship said binoculars to Bushnell along with a requisite $10 extortion handling fee to get them repaired. A few weeks later I received a letter in the mail informing me that some technician’s Magic 8-Ball read “Customer’s Fault”, and so my discontinued binoculars would not be repaired nor replaced. Translation: “we don’t make the parts for this model anymore and would prefer not lose the money to send you a new, equivalent model.”

Now, I’m the type of person who has a long fuse and whose passionate rage is rocket-fueled by only a few things, of which include being called or implied a liar, treated unfairly, or simply written off as a sheep who won’t stand up and swing back. One stern but respectful phone call was all it took. Today my brand new pair of Bushnell Binoculars arrived in the mail and I am happy to say that the lenses line up beautifully. But I had to wonder how many Bushnell customers have received the same letter as I did and simply chose to fold. Persistence pays.

This is the first post in an ongoing series that I am calling Dinner Discussion^®. The idea is that you are to bring up the topic over dinner with a friend and discuss. Then come back and post comments the insights you uncovered. I think it will be really interesting and fun to see some different responses.

The first Dinner Discussion^® topic is Thought-Communication Disparity: the incredible difference between the vast complexity of what goes on inside the human brain versus the relatively very simple communication channels we have to express it. Picture a huge, dammed lake where only small amount of water can get through the flood gates at any moment. For every word you utter (or type), millions of pieces of data process through your brain – from emotions to external sensations to associations and memories. What vast breadth of problems (personal, social, political, etc) arise from the extremely limited communication bandwidth between your brain and the other party? what can we learn from it? What opportunities exist because of it?

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I’m a little behind the fad, as I am just now reading The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell; but I am really enjoying the book, especially a section on Broken Window Theory. The basic idea is that major problems (i.e. crimes such as robbery and murder) will escalate in a vicinity if lesser problems (i.e. crimes such as graffiti, public disturbance, aggressive pan handling) are ignored. So, for instance, if a community repairs broken windows in its vicinity, then criminals can see that the community cares about the area, and is less likely to tolerate crime. Thus the criminals go elsewhere, seeking a path of less resistance. The psychology I want to focus on is that people will rise or fall to the bar that you set with your expectations and actions.

I would love to hear about a specific situation you have experienced where the Broken Window Theory applies. Feel free to tell your tale in comments section for this post.

I’ll start off with a small example of my own…

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