The trouble with gold stars 21 Apr 2006

You know how these things work: You buy a coffee, you get a stamp on your card, and when you reach some magic number, you get a free cup of the black stuff. Or that's how it should work. At Apostrophe, however, you get one stamp per transaction. It doesn't matter if you buy one coffee or twenty-one coffees; you're only going to get one stamp.

As a result of this system, we've started to notice our coffee-buying behaviour change. In the pre-Apostrophe era, we used to buy rounds of coffee - one of us would nip down to the shop and bring back coffees for all - but not any more. Now we each buy our own coffee to maximise the number of stamps we receive. That's what the system conditions us to do - we can either buy three coffees together and get one stamp, or buy three coffees separately and get three stamps - it's a no-brainer. As a result, we've lost the convenience of taking it in turns - now, when we need coffee, everyone has to leave the office to go and get it. We've also lost the social, communal (socio-communal) aspect of getting a round in.

We've also noticed that we feel bad about spending our money at Apostrophe. We debate whether to add a pain au chocolate to our order - "What's the point if you don't get another stamp?" And on the occasions when we are forced to buy a large number of coffees (client meetings, for example) receiving that solitary stamp makes Apostrophe seem really cheap - "A £30 quid transaction and all we get is one-eighth of a free coffee? Thanks a lot!"

While Apostrophe's system is clearly crazy, it got us thinking: are reward schemes really a good thing?

After a bit of digging, we discovered Alfie Kohn, author of Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes. Kohn has ardently spoken out against incentive plans to encourage good grades and behaviour at school. Kohn says, "A reward is not just something nice or desired, it's something nice or desired that is offered contingently when someone complies with our wishes or does something we like...[Rewards] work in the short term, but at a great cost. Rewards, like punishments, are useful for getting exactly one thing: temporary compliance."

He continues, "Two recent studies have found that children whose parents reward or praise them frequently tend to be less generous and caring than their peers. That might strike some people as surprising, but when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. The child who has been praised or rewarded for doing something nice has learned that the only reason to continue being nice is to get something for it."

This immediately struck a chord with us. We'd stopped the communal coffee-buying to maximise our individual collection of stamps, and we'd come to see the reward scheme as more of a punishment than a bonus.

So this morning we've decided not to go back to Apostrophe. We're going to find another local café instead. A café that doesn't give us gold stars. A café that simply serves good coffee.