A lightbulb moment at the self-checkout

I spent the last few days in Deal and Folkestone with Professor Richard Thaler at Nudgestock, Ogilvy’s seaside festival of Behavioural Science. On my way home I decided to stop off at M&S to buy some runny scotch eggs and a pie, accompanied by some unwanted green things to make my basket look middle-class. Finding a long queue at the main checkout, I grudgingly took my goods to the self-checkout machines.

(For the uninitiated, Richard Thaler is the co-author of Nudge, and more recently the author of Misbehaving. He is perhaps the godfather of behavioural economics, a dissident strand of economics which holds the outlandish view that the discipline might have something to learn from observing the behaviour of real people in everyday life, rather than concentrating on the serious business of constructing elegant mathematical models unsullied by any contact with humanity. Central to his work is the demonstration that small contextual cues — or ‘nudges’ — can have very significant effects, for good and ill, on people’s behaviour.)

Anyhow, some of Thaler’s magical aura had clearly transferred to me. Because just as I was about to start the usual infuriating and demeaning business of scanning my own shopping, I had a lightbulb moment. Suddenly I spotted what was wrong with the whole self-checkout malarkey. In short, the design of the machine contains a bad nudge. Above the weighing platform where you place your scanned shopping, two prongs stick out, with the handles of carrier bags looped over them. The inference you draw is that you are supposed to place your items into one of these bags after scanning. No doubt this was the designer’s original intention. Under no circumstances should you respond to this cue — as that way disaster lies.