A Diet Coke and Snickers Please…Wait Hold The Snickers!

This blog post is about as random and pointless as any that I have ever written. We can just consider it a rant.

Yesterday I was in a public building and wanted a Diet Coke from the vending machine. I haven’t indulged in a while and the price had increased from $1 to $1.25. That’s a nice 25% bump. I wish I could pass that increase along to my clients. But that’s not my rant today.

Then I thought that the increase was a brilliant move for more than the obvious reason. Sitting next to the drink machine is a snack machine. A lot of people, including me, don’t carry cash around much anymore and I especially don’t have change in my pockets. To buy the coke I would have to put in two $1 bills. The machine would spit out 75 cents in change. As I mentioned, a snack machine sits before me. Why carry the change around? Why not just drop it into the snack machine and get a Snickers bar?

What a strategic move to prompt impulsive purchases! This simple initiative created an excuse for the person to spend more money. It lured me in.

Then I browsed the selection of the snack machine. The Snickers bar and all candy bars were 85 cents!

Here I thought the vending machine person was a marketing genius. How so not true, because I didn’t have 85 cents. I had 75 cents and as I said before, I don’t carry change around.

I was more than willing to spend my 75 cents, but instead I left with it and the vending machine man lost a sale. My kids will ultimately get it now.

If there is a point to this post it is this…if you deal with people, you need to understand what motivates them. You need to think more about them than trying to squeeze an extra dime out of them.