26 ms·

The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

397 points by leoh 6y ago

sosuke 6y ago
I think this is the first time I thought TSNM; Too Short, Need More
oxfeed65261 6y ago
NPR’s headline is misleading—the problem was not free doughnuts, it was charging (briefly) for doughnuts. In any case, fascinating; thanks for posting.
- adventured 6y ago
  It's not misleading. Free doughnuts were part of the problem. The British soldiers were upset that they had to pay for their snacks while the American soldiers were receiving theirs for free, and it caused tensions. The free doughnuts helped to cause that imbalance and tension, which led to charging for the snacks.
  - birdyrooster 6y ago
    In that case, the British charging for donuts was part of the problem too.
  - dmckeon 6y ago
    One wonders what the alternative-history narrative would be if the US had offered to pay the Brits for their soldiers’ snacks? Perhaps the common UK complaint about US soldiers in WWII would have been: overpaid, oversexed, overweight, and over here. :-)
    - NikolaeVarius 6y ago
      With lend-lease, I can imagine at least some of it was already subsided
  - Chris2048 6y ago
    Maybe British soldiers being upset was only half of the situation: Maybe American soldiers in turn felt better to have such a benefit over British soldiers?
torgard 6y ago
As an aside, I am really, really surprised and happy to see a plain-text website available, if you decline cookies. That's a neat approach.
- Etheryte 6y ago
  As someone who has turned nearly all cookies off, I appreciate (and use) the plaintext site as well, but there's really no actual reason why they couldn't serve the regular site without cookies all the same.
  - torgard 6y ago
    > there's really no actual reason why they couldn't serve the regular site without cookies all the same. Well, handling it may be difficult on the frontend, depending on implementation. May very well be easier to just serve it as plaintext.
  - MauranKilom 6y ago
    I don't think it's GDPR compliant, but I'll take it over some other obnoxious "solutions" out there.
    - bhelkey 6y ago
      Oh, and why is that?
- alexjm 6y ago
  NPR has a full text-only version of their site. Here's this article there: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=156737801 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=156737801 The "sId" parameter on text.npr.com matches the penultimate part of the www.npr.com URL.
vmception 6y ago
Is there anybody alive that holds this grudge? Even with the article from 2012, I don't know Was this grudge instilled in children?
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  Institutional memory is a powerful thing, and forms a part of the identity of any members of an organisation with a strong culture.
- mjhouse 6y ago
  When I was in the Army, everyone hated the Red Cross, although the reasons shifted depending on who you ask. I've never heard about the doughnuts before. Most commonly, other soldiers claimed that they sold donated blood, although how true that is, I don't know.
  - bigtones 6y ago
    Yes, The Red Cross and almost all blood donor clinics sell their blood for hundreds of percent in markup. NPR also had a good series on that too: https://www.npr.org/2011/06/10/136931615/blood-bones-and-organs-the-gruesome-red-market https://www.npr.org/2011/06/10/136931615/blood-bones-and-org...
    - justin66 6y ago
      There is much, much more recent reporting on this matter. Blood and blood plasma make up something between 1.5% and 2.5% of the United States' exports. Which is weird. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/582509923?storyId=582509923?storyId=582509923 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/582509923?storyId=582509923?... https://www.newsweek.com/two-percent-us-export-income-blood-1476763 https://www.newsweek.com/two-percent-us-export-income-blood-...
    - thayne 6y ago
      It's not just blood. If you donate your organs, those are also sold. And the cost of the donated blood or organ is passed on to the recipient (or their insurance at least), probably with additional markup.
jankotek 6y ago
>The problem isn't the price Price was absolutely the problem. Soldiers were paid about $600 year. Not much for a job where you risk your life and dont have much of personal freedom or comfort. Free food was part of benefits. Charging soldiers for it seems ludicrous, they can not just leave, and go to nearest cafe.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  > "Free food was part of benefits" The Red Cross is a civilian organization that is not part of the army and was not, as far as I know, obligated to provide free donuts or coffee.
  - jankotek 6y ago
    Army asked for it, anyway politics are irrelevant to feelings. Pay was $50 a month, doughnut was 2 cents, that is like 1% paycut.
    - traes 6y ago
      Think of a random cafe offering complementary free donuts to veterans, and then deciding (or being told) to start charging for them. The Red Cross was not a perk provided and paid for by the army. It's really not that outrageous.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  I think you're misunderstanding. The Red Cross isn't the catering organisation of the Army. It's just a private organisation.
- tytso 6y ago
  The US Army leadership asked the Red Cross to start charging. The problem was the Red Cross was only giving free donuts to US soldiers, and this was causing the other nations' soliders fighting on the Allied side to be upset. Apparently their civilian population wasn't as generous as the US supports of the Red Cross. So getting rid of the free donuts was to avoid "dissension in the ranks". Why couldn't the Red Cross just give free Doughnuts to everyone? I'm not sure; maybe because they collected the money for "support our troops", and supporting the Brits might have been considered a violation of the terms for which the monies were donated.
andai 6y ago
See also: monkey grape experiment https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/02/27/283348422/that-s-unfair-you-say-this-monkey-can-relate https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/02/27/283348422/that-... I heard a related story (I'll add source if I find it) where monkeys received 2 grapes every day. This was increased to 3 grapes per day for one week. When they returned to the normal 2 grapes per day, the monkeys threw poo at the experimenters.
- jrootabega 6y ago
  Grapes ARE rich in fiber
- herdodoodo 6y ago
  UBI studies in a nutshell
blakesterz 6y ago
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 90% of people said yes. So, of course, the bosses all thought "hey we can make some extra money and people won't mind!" So fast forward to the next year, they charged the same for people to get in and something like $10 to get into the water park. Something like 101% of people were ANGRY. Not just a little angry, VERY angry. It was a HUGE change that people didn't expect. There were VERY few people that paid. I can't remember if they made it free that year or waited until the next.
- RandallBrown 6y ago
  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 made food sales increase too, because now people wouldn't have to pay for a drink too. Not sure if they're still doing that, but at the time they also had free sunscreen all over the park. It's an amazing little park.
  - graywh 6y ago
    They are still doing both.
  - save_ferris 6y ago
    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.
    - 6y ago
jokit 6y ago
TANSTAAFL
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  TANSTAAFD Remember when ATMs were free?
hammock 6y ago
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.
- jasonlotito 6y ago
  That's not true. In the past, we raised the price of our physical products. It never put a dent in our sales. The question is what are you selling, and who are you selling it to. Also, there is a difference between selling a service or selling a product. But no, we raise the price of our products, and never saw any issue from it.
  - weej 6y ago
    But did you lower the price then raise it? That's the key differentiator in the customer/retailer relationship that I believe the parent comment made.
- Retric 6y ago
  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 example have had very rapid price increases. However, it’s more common to increase prices a little faster than inflation which quickly adds up, see Disneyland for example. What brands can’t do is lower cost and quality then try and quickly add it back. PS: In 1964 Disneyland charged 25c/day for parking per day or about 2.08$ in today’s money. Except they currently charge 25$/day for parking.
  - jagged-chisel 6y ago
    I don't think your car example holds up. Sure, Honda has brands they call "Accord" and "Civic", but a 2019 Accord is different from a 2014 Accord. I don't think anyone would tolerate a rise in prices on a 2014 Accord manufactured year after year: if Honda never changed the car and continued calling it "2014 Honda Accord", I don't think they could raise its price. I'm a little closer to accepting your premise with Disney. However, it's not "parking" you're paying for; it's "parking at Disney" and Disney continually makes changes to its product offering. Further, neither "parking at Disney" nor "tickets for Disney" are a regular, periodic purchase.
blululu 6y ago
Interestingly enough I used to work at a company where the one any only benefit was occasional doughnuts on Friday (we did not get health insurance/dental/vision/retirement). And honestly we would all be pissed on the days when Doughnut Friday was cancelled.
- dependsontheq 6y ago
  The US is such a weird place.
- Forge36 6y ago
  My company did this once a month on new hire day. It was cancelled and people were very angry. This was a few years before i started. 10 years later people are still angry, and some never had that benefit!
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    It's like the monkey banana thing.
- conradfr 6y ago
  Reminds me of this story I read a long time ago on HN and which is on topic for this thread. https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%e2%80%93-soda%e2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear... edit: I see it has already been posted.
- catlas3r 6y ago
  Ask any tech worker in an office about the free snack selection. My coworkers get genuinely outraged when we trade out one brand of prepackaged nuts for another, or when their preferred soda goes out of rotation. Never mind they all make six figures and could easily purchase whatever snacks they wanted. The cost of the employee time spent complaining every time something changes here easily outweighs the cost of the entire snack program.
danso 6y ago
I didn't listen to the audio version of the posted link, but it's 5 minutes long and seems to be an excerpt of this 20 minute episode of Planet Money: https://www.npr.org/2020/01/08/794592539/episode-386-the-cost-of-free-doughnuts https://www.npr.org/2020/01/08/794592539/episode-386-the-cos... Transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/794592539 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/794592539
dperfect 6y ago
It's true - charging for something that was once free can be risky, but it isn't always bad as some might believe. I have great respect for businesses that charge for a service that provides real value - even if it was once free. Often times (especially in the startup world), companies start out offering a free product (operating at a loss) to gain market share. It's not often the best strategy, but in some markets it's one of the few ways to break in and gain traction. Obviously, you can't sustain operating a business that way forever, so you eventually have to make up for it somehow. Unfortunately, a lot of tech companies have (perhaps unintentionally) conditioned consumers to expect software to be free. The terrible consequence is that in response to that pressure, many companies choose ethically-questionable ways to make money when they need to, rather than simply charging a fair and honest price for their product (this includes selling users' data, overwhelming the user experience with ads, in-app purchase shenanigans, etc). Paying fair prices for things we use isn't the most appealing idea in the world, but (in my opinion) we probably need more of it, not less.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  A similar thing happens in the podcasting space. It's a pity it's still quite inconvenient to make micropayments. If I could make a single click to pay a penny for access to a single article, I imagine I'd do so frequently.
  - _bxg1 6y ago
    This is what the Brave browser is attempting to do, with mixed success
    - wpietri 6y ago
      There's also scroll.com, which is more netflix-y: you pay a fixed amount per month and it gets paid out to particpating sites you visit.
      - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
        Too few partners. Doesn't include the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, for instance. I favour the nickel-and-dime approach. I'm sure I'd only need to pay pennies per day to outpay advertisers. (I'm assuming that would be enough to keep these outlets afloat, which might not be the case.)
draw_down 6y ago
If I'm reading this correctly, some people still gripe about it. That's unfortunate but doesn't seem like much of a "cost".
jt2190 6y ago
(2012)
itsajoke 6y ago
This article rings very true to me. I once gave away a donut I had bought to a friend. I've regretted that mistake for almost 70 years now. Just think, I could be eating that donut right now.
WalterBright 6y ago
My head says people should pay for things, my heart says soldiers ought to get free coffee and doughnuts.
WalterBright 6y ago
Pricing things can be strange. Back in the old Zortech days, we included full library source for free with the compiler. Library source wasn't even available for other compilers. Nobody particularly cared that we did that, and it was never mentioned in compiler reviews in the press. One day, Borland decided to package partial (not including floating point) library source for their compiler as a separate product. The press went ape over it with headline articles about how great this was. (Philippe Kahn was a marketing genius.) Naturally, we at Zortech found this annoying. What we did was separate out the free library source into a separate package, and put a price on it. When people called up to buy the compiler, we'd ask "do you want the library source package, too, for an additional $XX?" They almost always said yes. So we made an extra $XX on each sale, leveraging the expectations Borland had set in the market. Of course, these days expectations have changed again. We give D all away for free.
- marktangotango 6y ago
  A looong time ago I worked at a comic book store and the owner had a table of freebies at the front of the store. The distributors were always sending marketing material with cool artwork, so instead of throwing it in the trash when it piled up, he figured why not give it away? No one touched it. Then he started packaging it into $5 “grab bags”. That crap was gone in a week. The lesson? “You can’t give shit away, but put a price on it and it’ll sell”. Maybe that says more about comic book store patrons than pricing, I’m not sure.
  - krustyburger 6y ago
    Not being able to see the contents, customers probably assumed there was something more valuable in there than promotional items. I doubt many of them bought more than one grab bag. I think Diamond (the distributor) frowns on stores selling items that were meant to be given away for free. To be honest, the owner doesn’t sound like the most reputable guy.
    - marktangotango 6y ago
      Iirc there was always at least one old comic in these grab bags, and this was 30+ years ago so it was silver age, and the bags were transparent. I just thought it was a cool story, have mercy internet stranger! This person was around 23, spent his inheritance buying the store from a WW 2 vet and was out of business within a year.
013a 6y ago
I can call out one example of a poorly executed price raise: Apollo Engine (https://www.apollographql.com/pricing 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 charge per registered user. This would have raised our bill to around $1500/month at our current scale, to get all of of the stakeholders in there. This is a cost incongruent with the value we were getting out of it. Even a ~$500/month price tag does not correlate with the value received, at our scale. It would one day (its a great product), but not today. So, today, we have two employees who have access to that, keeping our spend the same. Here's the key component of this pricing change though: They will, no longer, be able to grow revenue with us. A pricing change forced us to make organizational changes. Those organizational changes mean that fewer people are seeing any value the product could deliver. When fewer people see the value, then the product has fewer advocates within the organization; its fungible utility will eventually be rolled into a competing product we already pay for, like Datadog, even if the experience is worse, because when we discuss Engine its always prefaced with "Oh, I think Dave in ops uses that, no one else does".
- tomjakubowski 6y ago
  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.
  - 013a 6y ago
    I don't know about that. I suspect, generally speaking, per-user billing does not work for the vast majority of SaaS. It can really only work well in communication tools, where (1) most organizations receive a lot of value, (2) there's a network effect in play, and (3) expenses incurred by the provider generally correlate with the number of users. Slack. Jira. Notion. Etc. For an APM tool like Apollo, only one of these requirements is true. It does provide a lot of value. But, there's no network effect, and their expenses do not correlate with users on the platform. That last point is the craziest one; being long-time users of Meteor and Apollo, I've always questioned the technical and executive leadership behind the Meteor Development Group (now Apollo), and they've done nothing in recent history to give faith that its a well-ran organization. Retool (https://retool.com/ https://retool.com/) is another weird one. Amazing, amazing product. Truly transformative; what they're building there is unreal. There's a very light network effect in play, and usage may correlate better with users-in-app than it would with Apollo Engine, but charging per-user still feels weird. For them, I feel some form of bucket'ed plans, which allot X users, Y "applications", plus gated feature sets like SAML and Audit Logging, would make more sense. But, what do I know.
karaterobot 6y ago
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.
- Zenbit_UX 6y ago
  You got weird friends, no one's ever had to ask or bribe me, I would just offer to help. In turn I'd also be uncomfortable asking others to do manual labor for me, if they didn't offer when I said I was moving I wouldn't ask. Buying them supper after would be a given, no bribe required.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    “I’ll buy you pizza for helping me move” is an extremely common social interaction, to the point of being a trope. It’s not a bribe, it’s an acknowledgement that helping somebody move is a huge amount of work and some token of appreciation is wise. GP doesn’t have weird friends.
    - crankylinuxuser 6y ago
      Sitting down and having a meal is breaking bread with friends. Thats always more than a simple financial transaction of $20 or so. There was an article that time is our most important resource... Having a meal with someone is giving your most important resource to them, and them to you.
    - jhbadger 6y ago
      And when I was TA grading exams, the professor would buy us all pizza as well. It was technically unnecessary as grading was part of why were being paid as TAs, but it was a nice touch and put us all in a better mood and with a favorable view of the professor.
manuel_w 6y ago
It is interesting to me how much free givaways people get in America. In Austria (and maybe some other parts of Europe, not sure), not only that free refills are unheard of, you even get charged for ketchup sauce at McDonalds. (The minimal allowed food quality is higher, though, so there might be economic reasons on top of, I believe, primarily societal reasons.) It is charged somewhere around 40 to 50 Eurocent per 25ml.
- frakkingcylons 6y ago
  I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that if fast food places charged for condiments or soda refills in America, customers would become violent with employees. A customer shot employees at a McDonald's because the customer wasn't allowed to dine in the restaurant: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-07/police-2-mcdonalds-workers-shot-over-dining-area-closure https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-07/police...
  - greedo 6y ago
    When I worked at McDonalds during college, we implemented a surcharge for people wanting extra sauce for McNuggets. It was like $.25 each. If you bought a 6 pack you got 2 things of sauce. A 9 pack came with 3, and a 20 pack came with 5. So really, you got a lot of sauce included. But people were pissed. It was only a small portion of customers who even asked for more than the include packages, but they were hot about it. When I first started, we didn't even give free refills of soda or coffee. And I remember, we had this group of senior citizens who came in every morning as a group to just drink coffee and BS. Well, the tax rate in CA changed one day, bumping the price of a cup of joe up a penny. You'd think we had stolen their Social Security checks. They were outraged. Trust me, you do not want a pissed off senior citizen yelling at you when you're 16.
- theferalrobot 6y ago
  Even public restrooms are free in the States - not sure how that hasn’t caught on more
- hadlock 6y ago
postit 6y ago
Meetup folks can learn a lesion or two from this.
papito 6y ago
If you have a service where the free deal was too good to be true, then it works. I am not salty at the New York Times. I pay for the subscription and it is well worth it. Also, now I want a coffee and a doughnut, goddamn it. Is Dunkin still open in quarantine?
- elliekelly 6y ago
  They’re open and oddly enough they’re currently doing a “Free Donut Friday” promotion...
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djrogers 6y ago
Sounds particularly relevant given the recent Wink pivot that's being called 'ransomware'.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
This is something I have thought a whole lot about. I blog and I want that information freely available, but I also need an income. I don't have a problem with the fact that people on HN actively find ways around paywalls which I think people on HN tend to find surprising because I spend so much time criticizing the idea that "You people want good writing and you want it all for free, so you basically expect writers to be slave labor for you." What I'm saying is that this is not an easy problem to solve because in any business, some of the things you provide will be provided for free. For example, businesses that serve food have bathrooms available for free. In busy downtown areas or areas with a lot of homelessness, you will see local establishments with signs saying the bathroom is for customers only and some even have security codes so you can't just walk in off the street and head to the bathroom. But they don't charge for use of the bathroom. If you are a small shop, figuring out what to do for free and what to do for pay is a thorny issue because time is money and it's easy to end up in a situation where you are de facto slave labor. For some businesses on the internet, your members who are there because it is free can be part of the value you are bringing to the table and if you try to charge and you drive those people away, you may kill the business because now your paying customers have no reason to pay you. The membership base was part of your value position and you've just thrown the baby out with the bath water. So before you go acting like businesses who give stuff away for free are somehow nefarious actors, stop and realize that successful businesses have to pursue models that are viable and those models have real world factors. This is not just something decision makers at companies can arbitrarily decide willy nilly. You need to be taking the landscape of your marketplace into account when trying to figure out what piece of your product is the piece you charge for or monetize and what piece is something you give away for free. Historically, TV was free to viewers. You just needed to own a TV, but subscription channels came later. It got monetized with advertising and having a large audience helped you monetize it. That large audience was valuable to your advertisers, so giving it away for free to viewers was part of how you made your money. So this model wasn't born with the internet. It existed before the internet. And there are valid arguments to be made concerning things like "If you aren't paying for it, you are the product, not the customer" and lots of different angles to look at such questions. But at the end of the day, there is no free lunch. You somehow need to pay the bills. And sometimes the method that actually works effectively isn't as straight forward as "Well, just charge people for using the darn thing." Sometimes that doesn't work at all and in other cases it may work, but will limit your growth. Sometimes giving part of it away for free is how you grow to the point of being able to make serious money.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
This is a good cautionary tale and one I've seen played out in the tech industry with food. Even in the 80's it wasn't uncommon for a tech company to have a "beer bust" on Friday's where drinks and snacks were served as a social gathering for employees at the end of the work week. It was a turning point in employee relations when the VP of HR at Sun cancelled the weekly beer bust. Similarly at Google when they decided to scale back the legendary "mini-kitchens" full of snacks, "healthy alternatives" that were slowly pared down. One sociologist I read wrote, and I'm paraphrasing, "Sharing food with another is an action of great significance. Evolutionary, the sharing of food by hunter gatherers was more significant than sex in establishing a mutually bonding relationship." They went on to discuss the importance that meals played in our history and why we "throw a feast" to welcome heroes, and the Jesus' "big reveal" happened at a meal. The main point was that when you share food with someone you trigger a very ancient and well established mechanism. Conversely, when you stop sharing food with someone, you signal their ancient brain "I don't trust you any more, we aren't friends." Now whether or not that thought/emotion comes to the surface, it's very clear that the for many people the change from "sharing food with you" to "not sharing food with you" changes how they see their relationship with you. What is perhaps worse is that the damage is instant and irreversible. Even if you start sharing again, the people you stopped sharing with, even temporarily[1], will no longer feel the same trust that they felt before. At tech companies those people leave and eventually you have all employees who only remember the current system and so you're at a new "normal." Bottom line, taking away "free" food is waaaay more impactful on company morale/relationships than you would ever imagine unless you had researched it. Thus, it happens over and over again. And even though I know a company is just trying to make me like it by giving me free food, I can't keep myself from being positively effected by it. That response is buried somewhere deep inside my head that doesn't allow for excision. [1] Yes, there are ways to temporarily stop and not disconnect but that involves messaging before one stops sharing to both provide the external reason for the change and the conditions on which the change would revert back to sharing.
- hhmc 6y ago
  Your comment about the hidden impact of cancelling snacks reminds me of this article: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
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rb808 6y ago
I thought the regret would be diabetes and heart disease.
viburnum 6y ago
Troops and cops are the most aggrieved people in the world.
drewcoo 6y ago
It's not about "used to be free." The Red Cross regularly shows up wherever there are people in need and charges them for things of negligible value. Years ago I was in a natural disaster where the power was out. The Salvation Army was handing out free blankets and hot meals but the Red Cross was charging for cups of coffee. They are still like that to this day. No deep historical knowledge required.
tamaharbor 6y ago
I ordered take-out from Longhorn Steakhouse last week, they threw in a feee dessert... I did the same thing yesterday, But this time no free dessert. I am pissed!
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
I tend to make all my stuff open-source and free. I have no intentions of ever charging for it. I do this for a couple of reasons: 1) "Brand-building." I'm developing a "personal brand," and I do it for a similar reason as companies give away free T-shirts with their logo. 2) Lead by Example. I have a beef with the quality of most software, these days. I have decided not to whine about it. Instead, I just write my own software the way that I think it should be written, and leave it out there. Since quality isn't really a coefficient in most developers' minds, these days, it doesn't get much attention; which is fine by me. So...sort of "virtue signaling," but in an even more passive-aggressive way. I also have a personal policy of making all my work public, because I am used to it, and I think that it helps me to write better software. You always vacuum before the in-laws visit. I would never charge for my open source (MIT-Licensed) work, but I also put the source up there for the stuff I do charge for (a tiny pittance). It isn't licensed for reuse, but it's out there. If someone hires me to write proprietary software, then I won't put it out there (unless that's what the customer wants). I did a great deal of "behind the firewall" work that is likely to never see the light of day (indeed, much of it was in products that were never even officially released). Otherwise, I'm likely to keep putting my work out there for free; whether or not anyone else cares. I care.
- mikekchar 6y ago
  Free and open source licenses are really useful. Works licensed like that are worth significantly more to me that works that aren't licensed like that. Of course, charge whatever you want for your code, but I don't think you should avoid charging for code that has an MIT license. Quite the contrary!
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    Fair 'nuff, but I'm not in this for the money. I know that makes me a bit of an "outlier" in the tech industry, but I guess I'm a bit of a "throwback." I enjoy sharing, and I enjoy shipping apps. It's my dream to code for free; and I'm just about there. Writing the code I want to write, without having people deliberately spike the development process, is kind of fun. I mention my outlook here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-built-for-595f4ae2c284 https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-... BTW: I've enjoyed reading a lot of your comments. You like to write.
ryanmarsh 6y ago
Paying for doughnuts is not why veterans don’t like the Red Cross.
- bhelkey 6y ago
  Oh? Then what is the reason?
leoh 6y ago
Reminds me of the Google situation with Reader.
willart4food 6y ago
> "Imagine, for Thanksgiving, you go to your parents' for dinner and after a nice dinner they say, 'That's going to be $10 per person,' " Simonsohn says. "You would be upset." LOL, my first ex-wife's mother would charge $40/person for hosting the mandatory Thanksgiving dinner, after people also contributed in the way of co-ordinated sides, fixings, beverages. By the way, $40/person in the 90's. And no she was not poor, and nobody in the family was flush with cash.
- pkrotich 6y ago
  > my first ex-wife Now you have me wondering how many ex-wives you got! Sorry but couldn't resist.
RickJWagner 6y ago
One nit-pick. Per Wikipedia, "member stations derived 6% of their revenue from federal, state and local government funding, 10% of their revenue from CPB grants, and 14% of their revenue from universities" NPR is most certainly not 'free'.
8bitsrule 6y ago
"veterans don't like the Red Cross ... he always got the same answer: the doughnuts." For my dad it was the apples. "Shriveled and all dried out."
ja27 6y ago
I volunteered for the Red Cross for about 3 years in the 1990s and probably heard this two dozen times from from random people when they saw the logo.
Causality1 6y ago
It may be irrational, but I have a visceral hatred for people who make something free online and then take it down after they find a way to charge for it, especially if the community they were posting it on collaborated with editing, feedback, and suggestions.
paypalcust83 6y ago
Both of my grandfathers retired SMSgts and I have two veteran flag cases above the monitor where this was typed. According to my late paternal grandparents, who went through WWII, Korea, and Vietnam on active duty (and arguably the wives did as well), the American Red Cross had not-so-nice aspects to it that didn't get much press. Perhaps national governments should support apolitical, non-religious volunteer nonprofits more, but I can also understand the need for nonprofits to survive (which may often entail charging small fees). Charging people for doughnuts who don't make much money to begin with, are first-responders, active-duty military, or individuals who just went through a disaster seems kind of uncool where I come from. It's difficult to say how good they are today without first-hand and multiple accounts of experience. The available data shows they presently spend 3.5% ($104m) on admin and 6% ($177m) on fundraising. https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=3277 https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar... As an example, Feeding America, although they pay their CEO 16% more ($100k+), is a mostly better charity on paper.
kimi 6y ago
I am amazed at how good the no-cookie experience is. You get a readable, basic-HTML formatted article, and nothing else. And that is - go guess? - exactly what you wanted for reading an article. +1
mirimir 6y ago
So npr.org won't let me read unless I agree to be tracked. Which is illegal under GDPR, I think. But in any case, I've realized something. In the URL, just replace "https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/" https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/" with "https://www.wbur.org/npr/" https://www.wbur.org/npr/" and the damn page just loads. So I picked another npr.org article recently posted to HN: https://www.npr.org/2020/05/06/849996451/what-hamburgs-missteps-in-1892-cholera-outbreak-can-teach-us-about-covid-19-resp https://www.npr.org/2020/05/06/849996451/what-hamburgs-misst... And yes, this URL loads without challenge: https://www.wbur.org/npr/849996451/what-hamburgs-missteps-in-1892-cholera-outbreak-can-teach-us-about-covid-19-resp https://www.wbur.org/npr/849996451/what-hamburgs-missteps-in... So hey :)
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
One of the most demotivating experiences I had as an employee was when my employer put me on a commission scheme then did everything they could to wriggle out of paying the commission. They would have been better off not offering it in the first place.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Anyone remembers the drama that happened when JetBrains announced they're switching to subscription model with their IDEs? That's also a categorical change: from a product, to a service. After a deserved backlash, they fortunately backtracked and allowed people to buy perpetual licenses. But it left a bad taste.
fulldecent2 6y ago
Here's the solution. And it applies to Red Cross and other related enterprise changing from free to paid. 1. Stop giving away doughnuts 2. Start selling funnel cakes
hvasilev 6y ago
Same is with Free Software. On one hand it is nice that you are receiving so much value for free, on the other all business models revolving around it contradict basic sales principles and are wildly unsuccessful. So for example, I use horrible debuggers like GDB in 2020, because there is no company that is willing to put that much effort and take that much of a risk into developing a better tool debugger, since there are no profit incentives around it. You cannot really expect developers to pay for their tools in 2020 and that is both good and bad.

397 points by leoh 6y ago

I think this is the first time I thought TSNM; Too Short, Need More

NPR’s headline is misleading—the problem was not free doughnuts, it was charging (briefly) for doughnuts. In any case, fascinating; thanks for posting.

adventured 6y ago
It's not misleading. Free doughnuts were part of the problem. The British soldiers were upset that they had to pay for their snacks while the American soldiers were receiving theirs for free, and it caused tensions. The free doughnuts helped to cause that imbalance and tension, which led to charging for the snacks.
- birdyrooster 6y ago
  In that case, the British charging for donuts was part of the problem too.
- dmckeon 6y ago
  One wonders what the alternative-history narrative would be if the US had offered to pay the Brits for their soldiers’ snacks? Perhaps the common UK complaint about US soldiers in WWII would have been: overpaid, oversexed, overweight, and over here. :-)
  - NikolaeVarius 6y ago
    With lend-lease, I can imagine at least some of it was already subsided
- Chris2048 6y ago
  Maybe British soldiers being upset was only half of the situation: Maybe American soldiers in turn felt better to have such a benefit over British soldiers?

torgard 6y ago

As an aside, I am really, really surprised and happy to see a plain-text website available, if you decline cookies. That's a neat approach.

Etheryte 6y ago
As someone who has turned nearly all cookies off, I appreciate (and use) the plaintext site as well, but there's really no actual reason why they couldn't serve the regular site without cookies all the same.
- torgard 6y ago
  > there's really no actual reason why they couldn't serve the regular site without cookies all the same. Well, handling it may be difficult on the frontend, depending on implementation. May very well be easier to just serve it as plaintext.
- MauranKilom 6y ago
  I don't think it's GDPR compliant, but I'll take it over some other obnoxious "solutions" out there.
  - bhelkey 6y ago
    Oh, and why is that?
alexjm 6y ago
NPR has a full text-only version of their site. Here's this article there: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=156737801 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=156737801 The "sId" parameter on text.npr.com matches the penultimate part of the www.npr.com URL.

vmception 6y ago

Is there anybody alive that holds this grudge? Even with the article from 2012, I don't know Was this grudge instilled in children?

goatinaboat 6y ago
Institutional memory is a powerful thing, and forms a part of the identity of any members of an organisation with a strong culture.
mjhouse 6y ago
When I was in the Army, everyone hated the Red Cross, although the reasons shifted depending on who you ask. I've never heard about the doughnuts before. Most commonly, other soldiers claimed that they sold donated blood, although how true that is, I don't know.
- bigtones 6y ago
  Yes, The Red Cross and almost all blood donor clinics sell their blood for hundreds of percent in markup. NPR also had a good series on that too: https://www.npr.org/2011/06/10/136931615/blood-bones-and-organs-the-gruesome-red-market https://www.npr.org/2011/06/10/136931615/blood-bones-and-org...
  - justin66 6y ago
    There is much, much more recent reporting on this matter. Blood and blood plasma make up something between 1.5% and 2.5% of the United States' exports. Which is weird. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/582509923?storyId=582509923?storyId=582509923 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/582509923?storyId=582509923?... https://www.newsweek.com/two-percent-us-export-income-blood-1476763 https://www.newsweek.com/two-percent-us-export-income-blood-...
  - thayne 6y ago
    It's not just blood. If you donate your organs, those are also sold. And the cost of the donated blood or organ is passed on to the recipient (or their insurance at least), probably with additional markup.

jankotek 6y ago

>The problem isn't the price Price was absolutely the problem. Soldiers were paid about $600 year. Not much for a job where you risk your life and dont have much of personal freedom or comfort. Free food was part of benefits. Charging soldiers for it seems ludicrous, they can not just leave, and go to nearest cafe.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago
> "Free food was part of benefits" The Red Cross is a civilian organization that is not part of the army and was not, as far as I know, obligated to provide free donuts or coffee.
- jankotek 6y ago
  Army asked for it, anyway politics are irrelevant to feelings. Pay was $50 a month, doughnut was 2 cents, that is like 1% paycut.
  - traes 6y ago
    Think of a random cafe offering complementary free donuts to veterans, and then deciding (or being told) to start charging for them. The Red Cross was not a perk provided and paid for by the army. It's really not that outrageous.
chrisseaton 6y ago
I think you're misunderstanding. The Red Cross isn't the catering organisation of the Army. It's just a private organisation.
tytso 6y ago
The US Army leadership asked the Red Cross to start charging. The problem was the Red Cross was only giving free donuts to US soldiers, and this was causing the other nations' soliders fighting on the Allied side to be upset. Apparently their civilian population wasn't as generous as the US supports of the Red Cross. So getting rid of the free donuts was to avoid "dissension in the ranks". Why couldn't the Red Cross just give free Doughnuts to everyone? I'm not sure; maybe because they collected the money for "support our troops", and supporting the Brits might have been considered a violation of the terms for which the monies were donated.

andai 6y ago

See also: monkey grape experiment https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/02/27/283348422/that-s-unfair-you-say-this-monkey-can-relate https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/02/27/283348422/that-... I heard a related story (I'll add source if I find it) where monkeys received 2 grapes every day. This was increased to 3 grapes per day for one week. When they returned to the normal 2 grapes per day, the monkeys threw poo at the experimenters.

jrootabega 6y ago
Grapes ARE rich in fiber
herdodoodo 6y ago
UBI studies in a nutshell

blakesterz 6y ago

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 90% of people said yes. So, of course, the bosses all thought "hey we can make some extra money and people won't mind!" So fast forward to the next year, they charged the same for people to get in and something like $10 to get into the water park. Something like 101% of people were ANGRY. Not just a little angry, VERY angry. It was a HUGE change that people didn't expect. There were VERY few people that paid. I can't remember if they made it free that year or waited until the next.

RandallBrown 6y ago
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 made food sales increase too, because now people wouldn't have to pay for a drink too. Not sure if they're still doing that, but at the time they also had free sunscreen all over the park. It's an amazing little park.
- graywh 6y ago
  They are still doing both.
- save_ferris 6y ago
  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.
  - 6y ago

jokit 6y ago

TANSTAAFL

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
TANSTAAFD Remember when ATMs were free?

hammock 6y ago

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.

jasonlotito 6y ago
That's not true. In the past, we raised the price of our physical products. It never put a dent in our sales. The question is what are you selling, and who are you selling it to. Also, there is a difference between selling a service or selling a product. But no, we raise the price of our products, and never saw any issue from it.
- weej 6y ago
  But did you lower the price then raise it? That's the key differentiator in the customer/retailer relationship that I believe the parent comment made.
Retric 6y ago
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 example have had very rapid price increases. However, it’s more common to increase prices a little faster than inflation which quickly adds up, see Disneyland for example. What brands can’t do is lower cost and quality then try and quickly add it back. PS: In 1964 Disneyland charged 25c/day for parking per day or about 2.08$ in today’s money. Except they currently charge 25$/day for parking.
- jagged-chisel 6y ago
  I don't think your car example holds up. Sure, Honda has brands they call "Accord" and "Civic", but a 2019 Accord is different from a 2014 Accord. I don't think anyone would tolerate a rise in prices on a 2014 Accord manufactured year after year: if Honda never changed the car and continued calling it "2014 Honda Accord", I don't think they could raise its price. I'm a little closer to accepting your premise with Disney. However, it's not "parking" you're paying for; it's "parking at Disney" and Disney continually makes changes to its product offering. Further, neither "parking at Disney" nor "tickets for Disney" are a regular, periodic purchase.

blululu 6y ago

Interestingly enough I used to work at a company where the one any only benefit was occasional doughnuts on Friday (we did not get health insurance/dental/vision/retirement). And honestly we would all be pissed on the days when Doughnut Friday was cancelled.

dependsontheq 6y ago
The US is such a weird place.
Forge36 6y ago
My company did this once a month on new hire day. It was cancelled and people were very angry. This was a few years before i started. 10 years later people are still angry, and some never had that benefit!
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  It's like the monkey banana thing.
conradfr 6y ago
Reminds me of this story I read a long time ago on HN and which is on topic for this thread. https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%e2%80%93-soda%e2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear... edit: I see it has already been posted.
catlas3r 6y ago
Ask any tech worker in an office about the free snack selection. My coworkers get genuinely outraged when we trade out one brand of prepackaged nuts for another, or when their preferred soda goes out of rotation. Never mind they all make six figures and could easily purchase whatever snacks they wanted. The cost of the employee time spent complaining every time something changes here easily outweighs the cost of the entire snack program.

danso 6y ago

I didn't listen to the audio version of the posted link, but it's 5 minutes long and seems to be an excerpt of this 20 minute episode of Planet Money: https://www.npr.org/2020/01/08/794592539/episode-386-the-cost-of-free-doughnuts https://www.npr.org/2020/01/08/794592539/episode-386-the-cos... Transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/794592539 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/794592539

dperfect 6y ago

It's true - charging for something that was once free can be risky, but it isn't always bad as some might believe. I have great respect for businesses that charge for a service that provides real value - even if it was once free. Often times (especially in the startup world), companies start out offering a free product (operating at a loss) to gain market share. It's not often the best strategy, but in some markets it's one of the few ways to break in and gain traction. Obviously, you can't sustain operating a business that way forever, so you eventually have to make up for it somehow. Unfortunately, a lot of tech companies have (perhaps unintentionally) conditioned consumers to expect software to be free. The terrible consequence is that in response to that pressure, many companies choose ethically-questionable ways to make money when they need to, rather than simply charging a fair and honest price for their product (this includes selling users' data, overwhelming the user experience with ads, in-app purchase shenanigans, etc). Paying fair prices for things we use isn't the most appealing idea in the world, but (in my opinion) we probably need more of it, not less.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
A similar thing happens in the podcasting space. It's a pity it's still quite inconvenient to make micropayments. If I could make a single click to pay a penny for access to a single article, I imagine I'd do so frequently.
- _bxg1 6y ago
  This is what the Brave browser is attempting to do, with mixed success
  - wpietri 6y ago
    There's also scroll.com, which is more netflix-y: you pay a fixed amount per month and it gets paid out to particpating sites you visit.
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      Too few partners. Doesn't include the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, for instance. I favour the nickel-and-dime approach. I'm sure I'd only need to pay pennies per day to outpay advertisers. (I'm assuming that would be enough to keep these outlets afloat, which might not be the case.)

draw_down 6y ago

If I'm reading this correctly, some people still gripe about it. That's unfortunate but doesn't seem like much of a "cost".

jt2190 6y ago

(2012)

itsajoke 6y ago

This article rings very true to me. I once gave away a donut I had bought to a friend. I've regretted that mistake for almost 70 years now. Just think, I could be eating that donut right now.

WalterBright 6y ago

My head says people should pay for things, my heart says soldiers ought to get free coffee and doughnuts.

WalterBright 6y ago

Pricing things can be strange. Back in the old Zortech days, we included full library source for free with the compiler. Library source wasn't even available for other compilers. Nobody particularly cared that we did that, and it was never mentioned in compiler reviews in the press. One day, Borland decided to package partial (not including floating point) library source for their compiler as a separate product. The press went ape over it with headline articles about how great this was. (Philippe Kahn was a marketing genius.) Naturally, we at Zortech found this annoying. What we did was separate out the free library source into a separate package, and put a price on it. When people called up to buy the compiler, we'd ask "do you want the library source package, too, for an additional $XX?" They almost always said yes. So we made an extra $XX on each sale, leveraging the expectations Borland had set in the market. Of course, these days expectations have changed again. We give D all away for free.

marktangotango 6y ago
A looong time ago I worked at a comic book store and the owner had a table of freebies at the front of the store. The distributors were always sending marketing material with cool artwork, so instead of throwing it in the trash when it piled up, he figured why not give it away? No one touched it. Then he started packaging it into $5 “grab bags”. That crap was gone in a week. The lesson? “You can’t give shit away, but put a price on it and it’ll sell”. Maybe that says more about comic book store patrons than pricing, I’m not sure.
- krustyburger 6y ago
  Not being able to see the contents, customers probably assumed there was something more valuable in there than promotional items. I doubt many of them bought more than one grab bag. I think Diamond (the distributor) frowns on stores selling items that were meant to be given away for free. To be honest, the owner doesn’t sound like the most reputable guy.
  - marktangotango 6y ago
    Iirc there was always at least one old comic in these grab bags, and this was 30+ years ago so it was silver age, and the bags were transparent. I just thought it was a cool story, have mercy internet stranger! This person was around 23, spent his inheritance buying the store from a WW 2 vet and was out of business within a year.

013a 6y ago

I can call out one example of a poorly executed price raise: Apollo Engine (https://www.apollographql.com/pricing 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 charge per registered user. This would have raised our bill to around $1500/month at our current scale, to get all of of the stakeholders in there. This is a cost incongruent with the value we were getting out of it. Even a ~$500/month price tag does not correlate with the value received, at our scale. It would one day (its a great product), but not today. So, today, we have two employees who have access to that, keeping our spend the same. Here's the key component of this pricing change though: They will, no longer, be able to grow revenue with us. A pricing change forced us to make organizational changes. Those organizational changes mean that fewer people are seeing any value the product could deliver. When fewer people see the value, then the product has fewer advocates within the organization; its fungible utility will eventually be rolled into a competing product we already pay for, like Datadog, even if the experience is worse, because when we discuss Engine its always prefaced with "Oh, I think Dave in ops uses that, no one else does".

tomjakubowski 6y ago
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.
- 013a 6y ago
  I don't know about that. I suspect, generally speaking, per-user billing does not work for the vast majority of SaaS. It can really only work well in communication tools, where (1) most organizations receive a lot of value, (2) there's a network effect in play, and (3) expenses incurred by the provider generally correlate with the number of users. Slack. Jira. Notion. Etc. For an APM tool like Apollo, only one of these requirements is true. It does provide a lot of value. But, there's no network effect, and their expenses do not correlate with users on the platform. That last point is the craziest one; being long-time users of Meteor and Apollo, I've always questioned the technical and executive leadership behind the Meteor Development Group (now Apollo), and they've done nothing in recent history to give faith that its a well-ran organization. Retool (https://retool.com/ https://retool.com/) is another weird one. Amazing, amazing product. Truly transformative; what they're building there is unreal. There's a very light network effect in play, and usage may correlate better with users-in-app than it would with Apollo Engine, but charging per-user still feels weird. For them, I feel some form of bucket'ed plans, which allot X users, Y "applications", plus gated feature sets like SAML and Audit Logging, would make more sense. But, what do I know.

karaterobot 6y ago

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.

Zenbit_UX 6y ago
You got weird friends, no one's ever had to ask or bribe me, I would just offer to help. In turn I'd also be uncomfortable asking others to do manual labor for me, if they didn't offer when I said I was moving I wouldn't ask. Buying them supper after would be a given, no bribe required.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  “I’ll buy you pizza for helping me move” is an extremely common social interaction, to the point of being a trope. It’s not a bribe, it’s an acknowledgement that helping somebody move is a huge amount of work and some token of appreciation is wise. GP doesn’t have weird friends.
  - crankylinuxuser 6y ago
    Sitting down and having a meal is breaking bread with friends. Thats always more than a simple financial transaction of $20 or so. There was an article that time is our most important resource... Having a meal with someone is giving your most important resource to them, and them to you.
  - jhbadger 6y ago
    And when I was TA grading exams, the professor would buy us all pizza as well. It was technically unnecessary as grading was part of why were being paid as TAs, but it was a nice touch and put us all in a better mood and with a favorable view of the professor.

manuel_w 6y ago

It is interesting to me how much free givaways people get in America. In Austria (and maybe some other parts of Europe, not sure), not only that free refills are unheard of, you even get charged for ketchup sauce at McDonalds. (The minimal allowed food quality is higher, though, so there might be economic reasons on top of, I believe, primarily societal reasons.) It is charged somewhere around 40 to 50 Eurocent per 25ml.

frakkingcylons 6y ago
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that if fast food places charged for condiments or soda refills in America, customers would become violent with employees. A customer shot employees at a McDonald's because the customer wasn't allowed to dine in the restaurant: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-07/police-2-mcdonalds-workers-shot-over-dining-area-closure https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-07/police...
- greedo 6y ago
  When I worked at McDonalds during college, we implemented a surcharge for people wanting extra sauce for McNuggets. It was like $.25 each. If you bought a 6 pack you got 2 things of sauce. A 9 pack came with 3, and a 20 pack came with 5. So really, you got a lot of sauce included. But people were pissed. It was only a small portion of customers who even asked for more than the include packages, but they were hot about it. When I first started, we didn't even give free refills of soda or coffee. And I remember, we had this group of senior citizens who came in every morning as a group to just drink coffee and BS. Well, the tax rate in CA changed one day, bumping the price of a cup of joe up a penny. You'd think we had stolen their Social Security checks. They were outraged. Trust me, you do not want a pissed off senior citizen yelling at you when you're 16.
theferalrobot 6y ago
Even public restrooms are free in the States - not sure how that hasn’t caught on more
hadlock 6y ago

postit 6y ago

Meetup folks can learn a lesion or two from this.

papito 6y ago

If you have a service where the free deal was too good to be true, then it works. I am not salty at the New York Times. I pay for the subscription and it is well worth it. Also, now I want a coffee and a doughnut, goddamn it. Is Dunkin still open in quarantine?

elliekelly 6y ago
They’re open and oddly enough they’re currently doing a “Free Donut Friday” promotion...

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djrogers 6y ago

Sounds particularly relevant given the recent Wink pivot that's being called 'ransomware'.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

This is something I have thought a whole lot about. I blog and I want that information freely available, but I also need an income. I don't have a problem with the fact that people on HN actively find ways around paywalls which I think people on HN tend to find surprising because I spend so much time criticizing the idea that "You people want good writing and you want it all for free, so you basically expect writers to be slave labor for you." What I'm saying is that this is not an easy problem to solve because in any business, some of the things you provide will be provided for free. For example, businesses that serve food have bathrooms available for free. In busy downtown areas or areas with a lot of homelessness, you will see local establishments with signs saying the bathroom is for customers only and some even have security codes so you can't just walk in off the street and head to the bathroom. But they don't charge for use of the bathroom. If you are a small shop, figuring out what to do for free and what to do for pay is a thorny issue because time is money and it's easy to end up in a situation where you are de facto slave labor. For some businesses on the internet, your members who are there because it is free can be part of the value you are bringing to the table and if you try to charge and you drive those people away, you may kill the business because now your paying customers have no reason to pay you. The membership base was part of your value position and you've just thrown the baby out with the bath water. So before you go acting like businesses who give stuff away for free are somehow nefarious actors, stop and realize that successful businesses have to pursue models that are viable and those models have real world factors. This is not just something decision makers at companies can arbitrarily decide willy nilly. You need to be taking the landscape of your marketplace into account when trying to figure out what piece of your product is the piece you charge for or monetize and what piece is something you give away for free. Historically, TV was free to viewers. You just needed to own a TV, but subscription channels came later. It got monetized with advertising and having a large audience helped you monetize it. That large audience was valuable to your advertisers, so giving it away for free to viewers was part of how you made your money. So this model wasn't born with the internet. It existed before the internet. And there are valid arguments to be made concerning things like "If you aren't paying for it, you are the product, not the customer" and lots of different angles to look at such questions. But at the end of the day, there is no free lunch. You somehow need to pay the bills. And sometimes the method that actually works effectively isn't as straight forward as "Well, just charge people for using the darn thing." Sometimes that doesn't work at all and in other cases it may work, but will limit your growth. Sometimes giving part of it away for free is how you grow to the point of being able to make serious money.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

This is a good cautionary tale and one I've seen played out in the tech industry with food. Even in the 80's it wasn't uncommon for a tech company to have a "beer bust" on Friday's where drinks and snacks were served as a social gathering for employees at the end of the work week. It was a turning point in employee relations when the VP of HR at Sun cancelled the weekly beer bust. Similarly at Google when they decided to scale back the legendary "mini-kitchens" full of snacks, "healthy alternatives" that were slowly pared down. One sociologist I read wrote, and I'm paraphrasing, "Sharing food with another is an action of great significance. Evolutionary, the sharing of food by hunter gatherers was more significant than sex in establishing a mutually bonding relationship." They went on to discuss the importance that meals played in our history and why we "throw a feast" to welcome heroes, and the Jesus' "big reveal" happened at a meal. The main point was that when you share food with someone you trigger a very ancient and well established mechanism. Conversely, when you stop sharing food with someone, you signal their ancient brain "I don't trust you any more, we aren't friends." Now whether or not that thought/emotion comes to the surface, it's very clear that the for many people the change from "sharing food with you" to "not sharing food with you" changes how they see their relationship with you. What is perhaps worse is that the damage is instant and irreversible. Even if you start sharing again, the people you stopped sharing with, even temporarily[1], will no longer feel the same trust that they felt before. At tech companies those people leave and eventually you have all employees who only remember the current system and so you're at a new "normal." Bottom line, taking away "free" food is waaaay more impactful on company morale/relationships than you would ever imagine unless you had researched it. Thus, it happens over and over again. And even though I know a company is just trying to make me like it by giving me free food, I can't keep myself from being positively effected by it. That response is buried somewhere deep inside my head that doesn't allow for excision. [1] Yes, there are ways to temporarily stop and not disconnect but that involves messaging before one stops sharing to both provide the external reason for the change and the conditions on which the change would revert back to sharing.

hhmc 6y ago
Your comment about the hidden impact of cancelling snacks reminds me of this article: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

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rb808 6y ago

I thought the regret would be diabetes and heart disease.

viburnum 6y ago

Troops and cops are the most aggrieved people in the world.

drewcoo 6y ago

It's not about "used to be free." The Red Cross regularly shows up wherever there are people in need and charges them for things of negligible value. Years ago I was in a natural disaster where the power was out. The Salvation Army was handing out free blankets and hot meals but the Red Cross was charging for cups of coffee. They are still like that to this day. No deep historical knowledge required.

tamaharbor 6y ago

I ordered take-out from Longhorn Steakhouse last week, they threw in a feee dessert... I did the same thing yesterday, But this time no free dessert. I am pissed!

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

I tend to make all my stuff open-source and free. I have no intentions of ever charging for it. I do this for a couple of reasons: 1) "Brand-building." I'm developing a "personal brand," and I do it for a similar reason as companies give away free T-shirts with their logo. 2) Lead by Example. I have a beef with the quality of most software, these days. I have decided not to whine about it. Instead, I just write my own software the way that I think it should be written, and leave it out there. Since quality isn't really a coefficient in most developers' minds, these days, it doesn't get much attention; which is fine by me. So...sort of "virtue signaling," but in an even more passive-aggressive way. I also have a personal policy of making all my work public, because I am used to it, and I think that it helps me to write better software. You always vacuum before the in-laws visit. I would never charge for my open source (MIT-Licensed) work, but I also put the source up there for the stuff I do charge for (a tiny pittance). It isn't licensed for reuse, but it's out there. If someone hires me to write proprietary software, then I won't put it out there (unless that's what the customer wants). I did a great deal of "behind the firewall" work that is likely to never see the light of day (indeed, much of it was in products that were never even officially released). Otherwise, I'm likely to keep putting my work out there for free; whether or not anyone else cares. I care.

mikekchar 6y ago
Free and open source licenses are really useful. Works licensed like that are worth significantly more to me that works that aren't licensed like that. Of course, charge whatever you want for your code, but I don't think you should avoid charging for code that has an MIT license. Quite the contrary!
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  Fair 'nuff, but I'm not in this for the money. I know that makes me a bit of an "outlier" in the tech industry, but I guess I'm a bit of a "throwback." I enjoy sharing, and I enjoy shipping apps. It's my dream to code for free; and I'm just about there. Writing the code I want to write, without having people deliberately spike the development process, is kind of fun. I mention my outlook here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-built-for-595f4ae2c284 https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-... BTW: I've enjoyed reading a lot of your comments. You like to write.

ryanmarsh 6y ago

Paying for doughnuts is not why veterans don’t like the Red Cross.

bhelkey 6y ago
Oh? Then what is the reason?

leoh 6y ago

Reminds me of the Google situation with Reader.

willart4food 6y ago

> "Imagine, for Thanksgiving, you go to your parents' for dinner and after a nice dinner they say, 'That's going to be $10 per person,' " Simonsohn says. "You would be upset." LOL, my first ex-wife's mother would charge $40/person for hosting the mandatory Thanksgiving dinner, after people also contributed in the way of co-ordinated sides, fixings, beverages. By the way, $40/person in the 90's. And no she was not poor, and nobody in the family was flush with cash.

pkrotich 6y ago
> my first ex-wife Now you have me wondering how many ex-wives you got! Sorry but couldn't resist.

RickJWagner 6y ago

One nit-pick. Per Wikipedia, "member stations derived 6% of their revenue from federal, state and local government funding, 10% of their revenue from CPB grants, and 14% of their revenue from universities" NPR is most certainly not 'free'.

8bitsrule 6y ago

"veterans don't like the Red Cross ... he always got the same answer: the doughnuts." For my dad it was the apples. "Shriveled and all dried out."

ja27 6y ago

I volunteered for the Red Cross for about 3 years in the 1990s and probably heard this two dozen times from from random people when they saw the logo.

Causality1 6y ago

It may be irrational, but I have a visceral hatred for people who make something free online and then take it down after they find a way to charge for it, especially if the community they were posting it on collaborated with editing, feedback, and suggestions.

paypalcust83 6y ago

Both of my grandfathers retired SMSgts and I have two veteran flag cases above the monitor where this was typed. According to my late paternal grandparents, who went through WWII, Korea, and Vietnam on active duty (and arguably the wives did as well), the American Red Cross had not-so-nice aspects to it that didn't get much press. Perhaps national governments should support apolitical, non-religious volunteer nonprofits more, but I can also understand the need for nonprofits to survive (which may often entail charging small fees). Charging people for doughnuts who don't make much money to begin with, are first-responders, active-duty military, or individuals who just went through a disaster seems kind of uncool where I come from. It's difficult to say how good they are today without first-hand and multiple accounts of experience. The available data shows they presently spend 3.5% ($104m) on admin and 6% ($177m) on fundraising. https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=3277 https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar... As an example, Feeding America, although they pay their CEO 16% more ($100k+), is a mostly better charity on paper.

kimi 6y ago

I am amazed at how good the no-cookie experience is. You get a readable, basic-HTML formatted article, and nothing else. And that is - go guess? - exactly what you wanted for reading an article. +1

mirimir 6y ago

So npr.org won't let me read unless I agree to be tracked. Which is illegal under GDPR, I think. But in any case, I've realized something. In the URL, just replace "https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/" https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/" with "https://www.wbur.org/npr/" https://www.wbur.org/npr/" and the damn page just loads. So I picked another npr.org article recently posted to HN: https://www.npr.org/2020/05/06/849996451/what-hamburgs-missteps-in-1892-cholera-outbreak-can-teach-us-about-covid-19-resp https://www.npr.org/2020/05/06/849996451/what-hamburgs-misst... And yes, this URL loads without challenge: https://www.wbur.org/npr/849996451/what-hamburgs-missteps-in-1892-cholera-outbreak-can-teach-us-about-covid-19-resp https://www.wbur.org/npr/849996451/what-hamburgs-missteps-in... So hey :)

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

One of the most demotivating experiences I had as an employee was when my employer put me on a commission scheme then did everything they could to wriggle out of paying the commission. They would have been better off not offering it in the first place.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

Anyone remembers the drama that happened when JetBrains announced they're switching to subscription model with their IDEs? That's also a categorical change: from a product, to a service. After a deserved backlash, they fortunately backtracked and allowed people to buy perpetual licenses. But it left a bad taste.

fulldecent2 6y ago

Here's the solution. And it applies to Red Cross and other related enterprise changing from free to paid. 1. Stop giving away doughnuts 2. Start selling funnel cakes

hvasilev 6y ago

Same is with Free Software. On one hand it is nice that you are receiving so much value for free, on the other all business models revolving around it contradict basic sales principles and are wildly unsuccessful. So for example, I use horrible debuggers like GDB in 2020, because there is no company that is willing to put that much effort and take that much of a risk into developing a better tool debugger, since there are no profit incentives around it. You cannot really expect developers to pay for their tools in 2020 and that is both good and bad.