The goal of the game is selling sandwiches. You sell sandwiches by making it fun. You make it fun by taking fun seriously.
I bought a sandwich today. The sandwich shop offers a cute promotion: from 3 to 6 pm, if you call a coin flip correctly, you pay half price.
It’s fun, it’s attractive, and they net 75% of the normal retail price.
But the experience is broken.
First, you don’t pay until after the flip. So I, who sees loopholes without trying, am instantly aware that I could order the sandwich, flip the coin, and walk if it lands the wrong way. How would they even develop a process to stop me? I pay full price and then the flip determines my refund?
Second, the coin. It’s some B.S. commemorative coin — one side is the restaurant name, the other the logo — where neither side is obviously heads or tails. So the cashier has to tell me, and presumably every patron between 3 and 6pm, “this side is heads.”
Third, the flip. Less a flip than a half-spin. He calls it whichever way it lands in his hand. Not even the catches-it-and-slaps-it-onto-the-back-of-his-other-hand move that’s standard on any schoolyard.
What happened to the good ol’ quarter?
Why are we making this more complicated than it needs to be?
Why can’t the customer flip the coin onto the counter, where it would be easily visible?
Why not call the sides “name” and “logo” instead of heads and tails?
The sandwich was good. It satisfied my basic need – fuel after the gym so I’m not grumpy. It wasn’t $13.50 good. It’s definitely $6.75 good. It’s probably also $10.125 good (the expected cost).
Here’s what bugs me. The promotion could have been theater. A customer walks in, gets drawn into a small moment of drama, calls it in the air, wins or loses, laughs either way, tells their friends. Instead it’s a transaction with a dice roll bolted on. The cashier is phoning it in. The coin is wrong. The flip is wrong. The ritual isn’t a ritual.
The fun version costs them nothing. Same margin, same coin-flip odds, same sandwich. Just a real coin, a real flip, and a cashier who understands he’s running a tiny game show for thirty seconds a day.
And sure, if there are people in line behind me, by all means do the quick version. But the main reason they’re doing this promotion at all is because they don’t have many patrons between 3 and 6pm.
If they fixed it, I’d come back. If they fixed it, I’d bring people. The half-time half-price is nice; the experience could also have value.
Also, I called heads and it landed tails.
Julian Wise 