Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 317 posts

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#61

Post by WalterBright »

save_ferris wrote: post #23
RandallBrown wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A park in Indiana, Holiday World, did something sorta the opposite. They figured out how much the average guest paid for drinks, then raised the ticket prices that much but made all drinks free in the park. It was a huge success. People expect ticket prices to go up occasionally and they expect to be gouged for drinks. By getting "free" drinks, it felt like a huge value. (At least for me when I visited.) I bet it mad…

Ive been saying for years that airlines should do this. Add the price of an alcoholic beverage to everyone's ticket and then give those who want one a "free" drink. I never understood why they opted to go with ruthless cuts and declining customer experience.

> I never understood

The airlines are masters at A/B testing and figuring out what works best, as the industry is notoriously low margin and very cut-throat. You can bet that they price things this way because it works better.

BTW, people pay a lot extra for first class tickets and love the "free" drinks. Different classes is how the airlines optimize profits from different market segments. They're very good at this.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#62

Post by battery_cowboy »

beamatronic wrote: post #43
save_ferris wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ive been saying for years that airlines should do this. Add the price of an alcoholic beverage to everyone's ticket and then give those who want one a "free" drink. I never understood why they opted to go with ruthless cuts and declining customer experience.

Hawaiian Airlines offered free Mai Tais when getting close to HNL, for a long time. They used to have metal forks too. And they had great food too, included! I didn’t mind paying a premium to fly Hawaiian. Then they implemented cost cutting measures. Now I just fly whoever is cheapest.

Yes! Hawaiian was great for years, then they reduced the service considerably. Now, even locals who want to support locals don't fly Hawaiian because there's cheaper flights that have about the same service level.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#63

Post by dsfyu404ed »

afterburner wrote: post #48
Loughla wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grandpa is 97 this year. He still refuses to support the red cross, because they charged for coffee and donuts in WW2 Guam. He still talks about it like it was a personal attack. I grew up thinking the Red Cross was a for-profit war-profiteering leach of an organization.

> He still talks about it like it was a personal attack Not surprising, otherwise he wouldn't hold the grudge for so long. Many climate change deniers feel like even implying they're a (tiny) part of the (systemic) problem is a personal attack, hence their shitty attitude about science.

I know a guy who died recently who didn't eat rice and exclusively bought Chinese and Korean electronics as a result of his involuntary relocation to a certain pacific island from 1942-45. He wasn't personally the target by any of the orders that the people he was wronged by were following yet I think most people would consider the grudge reasonable since he was personally affected even though it wasn't personally targeted at him. I consider OP's grandfather's grudge to be along those same lines albeit over a much more minor wrong.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#64

Post by battery_cowboy »

Retric wrote: post #18
hammock wrote: post #12

Once you lower the price of a product, you can never raise it again. I heard that on/around HN at some point and I haven't seen it proven wrong yet. There's a reason why chip bags get smaller, why new versions that seem identical to the old come out, why Tommy Hilfiger will never be a prestige brand again. And it's because customers don't tolerate raising prices.

Cars are a major counter example. Over time the Honda Accord, Honda Civic, and Honda Fit all started at about the same size but the current Accord and Civic have grown significantly larger and thus more expensive. The idea is to let brands grow up with people, so someone who bought a civic at 30 can likely afford a slightly nicer civic at 35, and also needs an incentive to upgrade. A few well received wine brands for…

The size wasn't because of marketing or anything, it's because of the higher crash standards.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#65

Post by Spivak »

ellard wrote: post #56
hammock wrote: post #12

Once you lower the price of a product, you can never raise it again. I heard that on/around HN at some point and I haven't seen it proven wrong yet. There's a reason why chip bags get smaller, why new versions that seem identical to the old come out, why Tommy Hilfiger will never be a prestige brand again. And it's because customers don't tolerate raising prices.

Reduce the quality/quantity of the existing product to keep the same price over time. Release another similar 'product', possibly under a different product name and/or brand with the original quality/quantity but at a higher price.

The crucial part a lot of businesses miss is have some breadcrumbs for your most loyal customers to follow so you don’t lose them with the quality drop.

Don’t advertise it, just put it on your website where someone might be able to find it on Google.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#66

Post by blakesterz »

afterburner wrote: post #41
blakesterz wrote: post #8

I witnessed something like this when I worked at a Six Flags amusement park (wasn't 6F at the time) that had a decent size water park. They did exit surveys every night, asking as many people as they could if things were ok, and one year they also asked people "Would you pay extra for the water park", it was free as part of admission. So they wanted to know if people would pay extra. People said yes. Something like 9…

Was there something wrong with the way the exit survey was asked/written? Because that is remarkable. Was maybe part of the issue that people leaving when the exit survey was being run (at "night") not representative of the visitors as a whole?

Great questions, I wondered how they got it so wrong, I still wonder how they got it so wrong. It never occurred to me it may have been time of day they asked the questions.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#67

Post by WalterBright »

hammock wrote: post #12

Once you lower the price of a product, you can never raise it again. I heard that on/around HN at some point and I haven't seen it proven wrong yet. There's a reason why chip bags get smaller, why new versions that seem identical to the old come out, why Tommy Hilfiger will never be a prestige brand again. And it's because customers don't tolerate raising prices.

My father said when he was a boy there was the "nickel bar" of chocolate. The size of the bar went up and down with chocolate prices, but the bar was always a nickel.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#68

Post by tomjakubowski »

013a wrote: post #57

I can call out one example of a poorly executed price raise: Apollo Engine ( https://www.apollographql.com/pricing ) There was a time when they charged for data points/performance traces ingested into the system. At our scale, we were paying around $100/month. We were prepared to scale that to their, I think it was, $550/month plan when our usage got that high. They relatively recently changed their structure to char…

In general for SaaS, does it make sense to let customers choose between two (or more) pricing models, depending on their needs? Does this cause too much complication for the business? Curious why I haven't noticed schemes like this, other than at "enterprise" tiers where the customer is paying a lot for something closer to a custom solution and prices are negotiated.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#69

Post by karaterobot »

I didn't know about the Red Cross and its donuts. The example I've always used for this is helping a friend move.

If the friend asks "hey, will you help me move? I'm buying pizza and beer afterwards!" I will more than likely say yes, even though I can buy my own pizza and beer.

If they instead say "hey, will you help me move? I'll pay you $21.58 for your time," I'd probably bristle. Even though that might be the equivalent price of a few slices of pizza and a beer, the category has changed from showing appreciation to placing an actual value on my time, at which point working all day for $21.58 stops making sense.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#70

Post by _jal »

danso wrote: post #21
hammock wrote: post #12

Once you lower the price of a product, you can never raise it again. I heard that on/around HN at some point and I haven't seen it proven wrong yet. There's a reason why chip bags get smaller, why new versions that seem identical to the old come out, why Tommy Hilfiger will never be a prestige brand again. And it's because customers don't tolerate raising prices.

This made me think of living in New York, during the $1-pizza-slice boom during the 2008 recession, and I was curious how those places were doing in more recent years. Looks like 2 Bros. Pizza (as of 2018) was still sticking to a dollar, but other places may not have: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evk75k/the-slow-death-of-... > It’s a beautiful system, but it’s quickly vanishing from the city’s food landscape ri…

A slice in NYC tends to match the cost of a subway ride.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_Principle

Post reply on HN