Come on now. When you finished reading that paragraph through the eyes of a professional retailer, you knew there were important exceptions, didn’t you? Dining at a fine restaurant is best experienced as leisurely. This applies even to the delivery of the entrée. You don’t want to wait hours. But if you order the forbidden black rice risotto and the server dumps it in front of you thirty-five seconds later, alarm bells sound from your brain’s gourmet lobe. Hey, my sources tell me it takes thirty-five minutes to prepare a reasonably palatable forbidden black rice risotto.
Researchers at University of Michigan find that when it comes to products with a custom or artistic component, purchasers tend to consider a longer delivery time—within reasonable limits—as a signal of higher quality. Researchers at University of Singapore and University of Toronto say the same sort of thing holds for retail services. In their study—conducted in the world of commerce rather than in a university laboratory—consumers evaluated the price of a locksmith service as a better value when the service took longer than when the lock was picked faster.
Researchers at University of California-San Diego and Duke University discovered that although people say they would never pay more money if it meant waiting longer for delivery, those same people report experiencing substantial pleasure from anticipation during the wait. Other researchers point out how a significant percentage of people don’t mind at all waiting for an unpleasant experience, such as a dental appointment. Many of them use the waiting time to prepare themselves.
So recognize you’ll sometimes want to take inspiration from the Simon and Garfunkel classic, “59th Street Bridge Song” and allow your customers to do the same: “Slow down, you move too fast. You got to make the morning last. Just kicking down the cobble stones. Looking for fun and feelin’ groovy.”
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