There are few things that are further from my area of expertise than coffee retailing, but here’s a thought that occurred to me last week, and that’s been festering ever since.

All the major coffee shop chains and many local coffee shops have loyalty schemes these days. These are often of a particular type: buy X coffees and received the Yth coffee free. The generosity of such schemes varies widely: X=5 at McDonald’s, X=9 at Caffe Nero, and X=15 at Starbucks. Some chains do something slightly different – Costa, for example, gives points equivalent to 5% of the customer’s spend to be redeemed on future purchases, but let’s set those alternative schemes to one side.

The thing that links all of the common schemes is they are effectively fixed ratio reinforcement schedules. That is, they entice customers to buy more coffee by promising a freebie every X visits. But a wealth of literature from psychology reveals that this isn’t really very effective in getting people to form habits, not least because their motivation to consume drops off immediately after claiming free coffee Y.

A far more effective method of getting people to form habits is to build a variable ratio reinforcement schedule. As with gambling, this means that the punter / customer never knows when the win / free product is going to materialise. This keeps motivation consistently high.

In practice, what I’m suggesting is that the ratio of visits to free coffees is kept the same (X+1:1), but that the free coffees are dispensed at random. This would appeal to me: I’d love to come to pay for a coffee and be unexpectedly told that this one’s free. An infrastructure change would be necessary for some coffee shops – stamp cards wouldn’t really work well for this – but, for example, Starbucks already uses swipe cards which could be made to work this way fairly easily.

Alternatively, instead of randomising at the individual customer level, the tills could be set to randomise across all customers. Or, to make it even simpler, with every coffee purchased, each customer could be given a scratchcard with a 1 in X+1 chance of winning a free coffee. The latter might even be preferable, as there would then be two “special” visits: the one in which the customer wins, and the one in which they redeem their winning scratchcard. The customer would feel rewarded for their loyalty twice as often at no extra cost to the vendor.

If judging on cost alone, why would I visit retailer A, where there is no chance of getting my drink for free on a particular visit, when I could visit retailer B, where there is a 1 in X+1 chance? Economic discounting would probably play against traditional schemes: I’d probably rather have the chance of a free coffee today than the certainty of a free coffee after X visits.

Of course, retailers would have to be careful about how they presented this scheme: it would likely be to the detriment of any brand to associate themselves with gambling. Yet this seems like it should be a minor point, which should be easily overcome.

So here’s the thing: this idea appeals to me as a consumer, a wealth of literature suggests that it could increase trade, yet (to my knowledge) no-one uses it. Why not? Where’s the rub? What have I overlooked in my assessment? Tell me why I’m wrong!

Hayley B Elkins wrote a blog post late last year following the shootings at a school in Sandy Hook. It’s not about the shootings, but rather about Hayley’s relationship with guns, and how it has changed over time. Looking on from the UK, I always find the US obsession with fire-arms difficult to understand. Yet this very personal piece was moving and informative in a way that’s utterly atypical of writing on this topic. It’s a truly brilliant read.

This short, classic, harrowing book documents Nyiszli Miklos’s experience as a Jewish GP recruited under the threat of certain death to assit Dr Mengele in his “medical research” at Auschwitz. It describes the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, from the transport to Auschwitz and the so-called “selection” process on arrival, to the disposal of their ashes.

Miklos adopts a largely neutral, clinical tone in his description of the events. Somehow, this dispassionate tone makes the descriptions all the more powerful. Occasionally, Miklos’s neutrality slips, and his obvious abhorrence becomes clear. Sometimes, he lays bare his struggle with the diabolical ethical dilemmas he faced, challenging the reader to consider whether they would have reacted in the same way.

This is a simple, short book, yet the descriptions of some of the most appalling acts in the history of humanity make it challenging to read. The matter-of-fact tone merely underlines the seemingly unthinkable horror of the events which occurred at Auschwitz. The book’s brevity also contributes to its power: it says no more than it needs to.

This is clearly not the sort of book for which it would be appropriate to assign a star rating. I include it here only because I was unaware of this historically valuable volume until very recently, which probably reveals a degree of historical and litererary ignorance on my part. I guess that others might, however, be similarly unaware of it, and I hope that this will inspire them to read it. We must learn about and from history’s greatest mistakes if we are to avoid repeating them.

Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

After the council meeting was re-adjourned politicians set about slashing swathes of funding for much-loved services.

I assume that this sentence from this article in my home-town newspaper, is an indirect quote from one of the protesters rather than a representation of the view of the newspaper. However, an unfortunate preceding paragraph break makes it appear more like the latter.

The fact that this actually made me laugh out loud probably says more about me than the newspaper.

I really enjoyed this article from The Observer in which six famed British designers were asked to pick their favourite objects. The variety of choices is especially surprising. The article is by Megan Conner, Eva Wiseman, and Shahesta Shaitly.

In this new series of 2D posts, I’ll be picking two interesting articles which look at an issues from two different perspectives. Sometimes, they will be “for” and “against” a particular issue or concept, but more often they will just look at something in two totally different ways. I enjoy reading things in this way as I think it gives a more rounded perspective: I hope you will agree.

My first selection in this series is a pair of articles about Chernobyl, the site of the worst nuclear reactor disaster to date. The first article I’ve chosen is by Andrew Hankinson, who wrote in Wired about efforts to contain the nuclear reactor. The old sarcophagus around the reactor is falling to bits, and this article talks about the challenges of building the New Safe Confinement around the old sarcophagus.

For a second perspective on Chernobyl, I’ve picked a rather older article from the Guardian, by Imogen Wall. This truly fascinating story documents the “disaster tourism” that has built up around Chernobyl, and follows the writing on a day trip to see the reactor and the ghost town.

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them!

Sarah Bee published this moving story earlier this week over at NSFWCORP. Just occasionally, I come across a story that stops me in my tracks, moves me, and makes me think a little bit differently about life and medicine. This powerfully personal article about Sarah Bee’s experience as she watched her own father die in an intensive care unit in London is one of those stories.

I’ve been putting off writing this review for a little while now. It’s a difficult one for me. I only read Flat Earth News because so many people had recommended it, and most of them are people whose views I tend to agree with. But I’m afraid I didn’t really like it.

Flat Earth News is Nick Davies’s “exposé” of the practices of the media. Nick is, of course, a brilliant Guardian journalist, and is perhaps the journalist most responsible for the eventual uncovering of the widespread use of phone hacking by members of the press. Unfortunately, he approaches the task of “exposing journalism” with two central premises which I find bizarre.

Firstly, he appears to labour under the wrongful impression that members of the public imagine journalists to be crack investigators who stalk the streets with notebooks and pens, looking for exclusive stories to serve up to expectant readers. Clearly, as an adult who lives in the real world, I know that’s not what a journalist’s job is like. I know that journalists are expected to churn out multiple stories per day, and I know that most of what they write starts out as wire copy or press releases. It’s true to say that I didn’t fully realise the extent of the number of stories they’re expected to file, nor the extent of the reliance on agency copy, but I didn’t think the world of modern journalism was made up of Lois Lanes. This makes the tone he uses for much of the book seem enormously patronising. I can honestly say that I’ve never felt as patronised by any factual book I’ve ever voluntarily subjected myself to as I did by the first third of this book. It’s horrendous.

Secondly, he claims – and repeats ad nauseam – that the central job of any journalist is to tell the truth. Again, I’m afraid I cannot agree with this. There are many parts of any journalist’s job which are equally as important as telling the truth – engaging readers and selling papers being two of the more important ones. He seems to suggest that an ideal newspaper would simply be a list of facts of things that occurred during the day, with few adjectives and no opinions. That is clearly not sensible, as nobody in their right mind would part with good money for something so utterly dull.

Those are the two big, central problems with the book. They are the two which each and every time they crop up made me want to scream. There were times when I actually had to put this enormously repetitive book down and walk away. But, in a way, this is only the start of the list of problems.

When I read books with the intention of reviewing them, I often make notes along the way. I select key quotes, I list the bits I really like and the bits that made me angry. This book caused me to write more notes than any other I’ve ever reviewed for this site, and almost all were in the “bits that made me angry” category. I don’t intend to make all of those points here, but I will share a select few which raised questions in my mind that Davies failed to answer.

Davies has bizarre ideas on what is and isn’t news. He cites a story in which there was a rumour of Terry Leahy stepping down from his role at Tesco. In the face of these rumours, Tesco issued a denial. Davies then criticises news bulletins for continuing to run the story that a rumour was circulating but that it had been denied by Tesco. Does he honestly believe that this story is not newsworthy? Should flat denials always be taken at face value?

There’s a section of this book where Davies criticises the Daily Mail for not having a coherent economic policy. Seriously, I’m not making this up. He talks about the unexpressed and hence unexamined “moral values” which underpin reportage in newspapers, citing the Daily Mail’s treatment of asylum seekers as an example. I’m afraid it’s a little beyond this reviewer to understand how Davies can argue that the Daily Mail’s attitude towards asylum seekers has not been widely acknowledged, criticised and challenged. But, beyond this, he then goes on to suggest that the Daily Mail’s opposition to immigration coupled with its support of free trade adds up to a deeply flawed economic policy. Does Davies honestly believe that a newspaper like the Daily Mail should put forward coherent economic policies? Really? Of course the Daily Mail picks and chooses causes, and of course they do not add up to anything sensible. I struggle to believe that people – including its readers and editor – would argue that the Daily Mail offers a cohesive policy for government, however it presents itself. This feels a bit like criticising Bram Stoker for opening Dracula with the suggestion that all events within the novel are accurate reporting of a true event.

There’s an odd passage in which Davies criticises a newspaper – I forget which one – for reversing its stance on the Iraq war in the face of plummeting readership. Yet I wonder what he believes to be the alternative? If readers are deserting a paper due its opinions, does Davies suggest that it should continue to parrot the same line until it is forced, by lack of readership, to close?

Davies argues that the BBC’s aim to break news within five minutes of it reaching the newsroom is flawed because it doesn’t allow for checking. Does he honestly think that the BBC should only ever report confirmed stories? Does he believe that repeating clearly identified “unconfirmed reports”, as they so frequently do, harms the practice of journalism? Is it his honest belief that if they returned to the old days of checking every detail before publishing that their readers, viewers and listeners wouldn’t desert them in favour of faster rivals? Or does he believe that it doesn’t matter than nobody watches, provided that there is a news outlet of record?

And how does Davies suggest that journalism should be funded? He suggests several times in the book that the funding sources of some campaign groups mean that their view of the world is, by definition, skewed by the funders and should be ignored. So who does he suggest should fund the media? Who has he thought of as a potential provider of revenue to fund totally impartial journalism? He has no answer to this question, but suggests in his epilogue that money saved from moving to digital publication rather than dead tree publication should be reinvested in journalism. The suggestion, of course, completely misses the point that nobody has yet worked out how to make anywhere like the revenue from digital journalism as from print journalism, so there is no money to be reinvested.

Yet, for all of its many faults, I think this is an important book. Strip away the odd proselytising tone, and within this book there is an interesting, informative and detailed “state of the profession” report. There are still those who believe that the Daily Mail prints literal truth, those that don’t understand how news stories are gathered, and those that think that quotes in newspapers are verbatim transcripts of something that someone actually said. For those people, this book would doubtless be an eye-opener.

All of this leaves me with something of a dilemma. I hated this book. I found it patronising, and a real struggle to get through. It’s irritating tone made me frequently set it aside to read something that made me less angry. And yet, I recognise that it is important, and that many people like it. Indeed, many people like it very much. So how many stars should I give? Since there’s no easy answer, I’m going to plump for an arbitrary three.

Flat Earth News is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

As regular readers will be aware, I currently publish book reviews on Wednesdays. However, I’m currently struggling to keep up with that publishing schedule, yet I’m way ahead of schedule for the Weekend Reads series.

As a result, I’m making a change. Book reviews will now appear every other Wednesday. For the alternate Wednesdays, I’ll be starting a new series of posts which I’m calling “2D”. In this series, I’ll recommend a pair of articles which look at an issue from two different (though not necessarily opposing) perspectives. I think it will make for a very interesting series of posts.

So, tomorrow I’ll be publishing a review of Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News. But the following Wednesday – 27th February – there will be no book review. In it’s stead will be the first in the 2D series, which will feature Chernobyl. And the features will continue on alternate weeks thereafter.

I hope you’ll continue to enjoy the posts!

A little over five years ago, I wrote a ranty post about those ludicrous backronyms that some people seem to enjoy spreading, and often seem to genuinely believe. Today, the OxfordWords blog has done the opposite, posting “5 words you didn’t know were acronyms”. I suspect you probably did know that at least some of them were acronyms, but “pog” and “care package” were new to me, and the whole post is definitely worth a read!