Not the main topic, but the article is in part on how people respond to changing normative pressures so I think it's fair: I'm surprised at the low level of inf

Not the main topic, but the article is in part on how people respond to changing normative pressures so I think it's fair: I'm surprised at the low level of information in this article given that it's written by the original researchers! In many other fields I would have expected greater specificity and care from academics presenting their work to a lay audience. For example they say "our results were clear" but then only describe the direction of the effect -- they give no numbers about magnitude or significance! And following the link to their paper ... it seems pretty bad? Study 1a was done at a single brewpub, which uses 2 POS systems from the same provider, one counter-based and one hand-held. They say nothing about what kinds of customers or transactions get the hand-held (presumably table-side?) POS system instead of the counter-based one. Are these different group sizes? Different seating areas? Food vs not? It's not a random assignment? So (a) it's hard to know whether the effect is real in the one business they measured with or if it's just that different kinds of customers are more or less likely to return and (b) it's hard to know whether this actually generalizes to other businesses. What was the effect size? During a 1 year period, customers whose first visit used a handheld POS had 1.1 subsequent visits vs 1.46 for customers whose first visit (within the period) used a counter-based POS. They're grouping people by their first visit in the period, as if that's going to be determinative of how they think about the business, but they don't know which customers were actually new (i.e. one month before the captured period, did you go and use a hand-held POS and then in the 3rd month of their period you went and used a counter-based POS? You're in the counter-based group.) All the rest of the 'studies' in their paper are market-research surveys.