<story><title>Locksmith gets less tips and more price complaints for being faster</title><url>http://danariely.com/2010/12/15/locksmiths/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrockway</author><text>Interesting.  I always found those machines to be annoyingly slow and loud.&lt;p&gt;My theory with money: the less your customer has, the more important appearances are.  Go to your local bank and look at how nicely dressed the tellers that are cashing grandma&apos;s $20 check, and then go to their trading floor and look at the traders that are trading millions of dollars a day.&lt;p&gt;In the case of Coinstar, every penny is important to the customer, even though a penny is worth approximately nothing.  (And of course, they take 10% anyway, so their incentive is to over-count, not under-count, but I digress...)</text></item><item><author>davidblair</author><text>Coinstar is a great example of this.&lt;p&gt;The machine is able to calculate the total change deposited almost instantly. Yet, during testing the company learned that consumers did not trust the machines. Customers though it was impossible for a machine to count change accurately at such a high rate.&lt;p&gt;Faced with the issues of trust and preconceived expectations of necessary effort, the company began to rework the user experience.&lt;p&gt;The solution was fairly simple. The machine still counted at the same pace but displayed the results at a significantly slower rate. In fact, the sound of change working the way through the machine is just a recording that is played through a speaker.&lt;p&gt;Altering the user experience to match expectations created trust and met the customers expectation of the necessary effort to complete the task.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>colanderman</author><text>No, the incentive would be for them to undercount as the money still ends up in the machine.  $10 in the machine counted as $10 nets $1 in profit.  $10 in the machine counted as $9 nets $1.90 in profit.</text></comment>
<story><title>Locksmith gets less tips and more price complaints for being faster</title><url>http://danariely.com/2010/12/15/locksmiths/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrockway</author><text>Interesting.  I always found those machines to be annoyingly slow and loud.&lt;p&gt;My theory with money: the less your customer has, the more important appearances are.  Go to your local bank and look at how nicely dressed the tellers that are cashing grandma&apos;s $20 check, and then go to their trading floor and look at the traders that are trading millions of dollars a day.&lt;p&gt;In the case of Coinstar, every penny is important to the customer, even though a penny is worth approximately nothing.  (And of course, they take 10% anyway, so their incentive is to over-count, not under-count, but I digress...)</text></item><item><author>davidblair</author><text>Coinstar is a great example of this.&lt;p&gt;The machine is able to calculate the total change deposited almost instantly. Yet, during testing the company learned that consumers did not trust the machines. Customers though it was impossible for a machine to count change accurately at such a high rate.&lt;p&gt;Faced with the issues of trust and preconceived expectations of necessary effort, the company began to rework the user experience.&lt;p&gt;The solution was fairly simple. The machine still counted at the same pace but displayed the results at a significantly slower rate. In fact, the sound of change working the way through the machine is just a recording that is played through a speaker.&lt;p&gt;Altering the user experience to match expectations created trust and met the customers expectation of the necessary effort to complete the task.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>phsr</author><text>When you get a gift card from Coinstar, you are not charged the 10%.  So when I&apos;m feeling lazy with a bunch of change, I just dump it in the Coinstar machine for a Amazon gift card</text></comment>