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Or famously, Pret, which is a chain of sandwich and coffee shops in London and New York, they offer a plan $5 a month to get up to five half-priced coffees.

Now, if you're already a Pret member and you've given them that $5 each month, and then you're walking down the road, you're much more likely to skip the Starbucks, skip the Costa Coffee, and walk the extra 100 feet to go to Pret, which isn't necessarily logical, but it's because you want to be consistent with that membership that you've already gotten.

So lots of brands have now tapped into this.

It's why subscription pricing is so prevalent.

But what's really an interesting factor of subscription pricing that a lot of people don't talk about is, would it be better to charge them once a year for $139?

That's the going rate of Amazon Prime.

Or is it better to charge them $9.99 every month?

And fascinating number of studies reveal that the pain of payment every month helps reinforce that consistent behavior and improves your chance of using the product because you're reminding yourself through your credit card statement that this is the type of buyer I am.

I'm an Amazon Prime member.

I'm a gym subscription member.

And if my gym bills me every month, I better get back to the gym this month.

So sometimes you want to reduce the pain of payment.

You do not want people to feel the size of that spend.

And other times, like in this bias, a little bit of reminding them the pain of payment may help them use your product more frequently and more often.

So that's some of the big insights around how we use the sunk cost fallacy to get people to come back.

Probably one of the most interesting studies that double underscores this point is another study from Arx and Blummer, but this time they're studying theater goers.

And so they line up, I think it's the University of Ohio, and they go to the campus theater

And they have people lining up to buy their season tickets for all the shows that the university is gonna show.

And so they randomly divide up people that are coming up to the window.

Some people are charged $15, full price for the tickets to the university shows.