The Laziness Quotient

There is a coke machine very close to where I sit at work. It is on the main hallway of the first floor. It charges $1.35 for a 20 oz bottle of Coke. On the second floor, the vending machines charge $1.25, 10 cents less, for the same bottle.

Both vending machines are run by the same company, but there is a difference in price. Someone has figured out my laziness quotient.

I discovered this price disparity by accident. I wanted a Dr. Pepper, which was only available on the second floor vending machines. It was there I noticed this price difference. Why, I asked myself, why would the same company charge two different prices for exactly the same item?

There was only one reason - because they knew I was lazy.

They knew they could extract an extra dime out of me because I was too lazy to walk upstairs and save an extra 10 cents. And they are right. When I need a Coke fix, I rarely make the trip to the second floor.

I give them credit for their ingenuity. They have figured out how much my time and effort are worth and they have extracted a price premium because of it. So what is my laziness quotient? At what point will I be willing to put out the effort to save money? I tried to find out:

There are three factors at work here: money, time and effort.

Money: How much is the difference between the two options - the lazy one and the discounted item? In this case 10 cents.

Time: How much longer does it take me to get the coke from upstairs? It takes me 13 seconds to get from my desk to the 1st floor Coke machine (assuming there is no traffic). To get to the second floor machine, it takes 1:37 seconds (again, assuming no traffic). Transaction time is a wash, so the difference is: 97-13=84 x 2 (return trip) = 168 seconds, or 2:48.

Effort: The big difference in effort is really the stairs. There are 23 steps I have to walk up to get to the next floor (I know- it doesn't seem right. The first set of stairs has 12 steps to the mid-point landing, but the second set has only 11. I find this very odd at a company full of engineers, but I double checked: 23 steps.) So with the return trip, there are 46 stairs to be navigated.

So by my thinking, the laziness formula would be in the structure of the following:

(x*168) + (y*46) = (z*0.1)

Where x, y and z are the coefficients which need to be solved.

I'll be looking for other settings to gather data to solve this one. I think sporting events would be a good venue. In the meantime, I will try to figure out why on earth soda bottles are so large nowadays (remember when 16oz containers were considered large?) and what is the theoretical limit of the amount of coke one person should drink at a sitting.

Happy Laziness!