The customers a promo code brings

An online shop that grew on promo codes ends up with a particular kind of customer, and it is often surprised by them.

They scroll past its phone cases twice and order only on the days the banner carries a discount. When the discount stops, so do the orders. They write a sharp review when the parcel is late. They message to ask why last month's code no longer works.

The shop calls this disloyalty. It is closer to obedience. These are precisely the people the shop went looking for. It told a city full of hungry, careful spenders that the reason to pick it was the price on a Thursday, and the city listened.

The same thing happens well beyond phone cases. The private tutor who wins families in Dokki by being the cheapest will spend the year defending the fee. The clothes shop that only fills up during the sale has trained its street to wait for the sale.

None of this is a malfunction. Customers learn what an offer teaches them, quickly and well. The first reason we give someone to walk through the door becomes the reason they expect to keep hearing, and the person it attracts is the person who cares most about that reason.

It is tempting to wish for a different crowd while keeping the same offer. It does not happen. The customers in front of the shop are not a failure of the system. The system is working, faithfully, on the brief the shop actually wrote rather than the one it meant.