When my wife and I purchased a new car a few weeks ago, there wasn't much negotiating we could do: supply was low, demand was high, and our salesman shrugged off our attempts at moving the price down with a final "I'll sell this car by 2 p.m. today if you don't want it now."
He was a good salesman, though, and had considered our future return business. He made sure we left the dealer with a consolation prize—a set of floor liners that he'd thrown in for free.
But it backfired.
Four months later—continuous snow on the ground around our house since Christmas—the floor liners remain backordered and the dealer has been cagey and uncommunicative about when we can expect them.
Not how the salesman should want this to shake out: what was a pleasant purchase experience—of a vehicle that we love!—has soured.
The whole experience reminded me of a section in Daniel Pink's book When about the power of endings:
The encoding power of endings shapes many of our opinions and subsequent decisions. For instance, several studies show that we often evaluate the quality meals, movies, and vacations not by the full experience but by certain moments, especially the end.
What Pink is pointing to is the "peak-end rule," a psychological heuristic formulated by Daniel Kahneman and others. People judge an experience based on the peak (or high point) and the end, rather than the cumulative experience.
The peak-end rule isn't hard and fast, of course—but it's a decent heuristic for how to evaluate our feelings about an experience.
When we left the hospital last week with a new baby (!), the shift nurse insisted on accompanying us—pushing my wife in a wheelchair—all the way down to the curb, and cheerfully helping us into our car.
Not every part of our hospital stay was easy or enjoyable—but this ending was.
So: be wary of endings. We all know they're important, but it turns out they're even more important than we think.
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