Sequencing Attack Against Coffee Shop Clerks
This here is a story what happened to a friend of mine. It relies on the fact that people enter a kind of trance-like state when they do something monotonous. Behold, the sequencing attack against coffee shop clerks!
Here is how it goes normally: you go into a coffee shop. You give the clerk money, the clerk gives money back. Then you hand the coffee card to get a stamp (”every 11th coffee free!”), clerk stamps it and hands it back to you.
The clerk does this a lot, like a hundred times a day, five days a week, four weeks a month. The whole process of selling a coffee and interacting with the client becomes semi-autonomous, requiring very little (if any) thought, especially if everything follows the most common scenario without interruptions or special cases.
So, what my friend did was to interrupt the trance-like state of the clerk. Instead of starting at the beginning of the sequence, he jumped directly to a point in the sequence where the coffee card was given, simply by giving the coffee card. Then the clerk asked “Is the card full?” and he replied “No, unfortunately not yet.”. What happened next is the clerk gave the stamped card back with change. In other words, the clerk gave him a free coffee, a stamp, and even some small change!
Maybe it was the small talk which distracted the clerk enough to break the semi-trance-like state and become somewhat confused before continuing the sequence the best he could. The clerk had already gotten the card, but had not given change back (for some reason he seemed to remember this, although clearly he didn’t remember not receiving any money). So the clerk just stamped the card and gave some change back.
My friend repeated this twice with the same clerk and it worked both times. Being the good-natured jolly person he is, on the second time he had to interrupt the clerk by saying he hadn’t given the clerk any money yet.
The question now is: exactly why does this work? The clerk was male - would a female have spotted the problem (as there is at least anecdotal evidence of females being better in multitasking)? Is there something wrong with the clerk?
