Costco!

In preparation for our study break on Tuesday (2/22/11), Brendan and I made a trip to Costco (and an unplanned trip to Wal-Mart) on Sunday. Earlier in the weekend we'd discussed various ideas about how to get information about why people don't come to Friday service and what we could do to encourage people to come and we'd decided to hold a study break to get people to share their ideas. Once we decided on a study break we had to figure out how to get people to come to our study break.
The answer to the question of "How do you get college students to come to something?" should be painfully obvious - you offer them free food. Once we decided we wanted to have food, we had to decide what kind of food to have. People like pizza, but it's a pretty common lure and one of the principles of persuasion that we discussed in class was scarcity. Even though people like having pizza after the dining hall has closed (especially for free) it is very common. We decided that people would be more likely to come if we had something rare in addition to pizza.
Our first idea was to get Fun Dip (a candy that people don't get very often) and then we thought of otter pops (also known as freeze pops) because they're quite cheap and they're scarce at colleges (especially in February).
With this plan in mind, Brendan, Patrick, and I headed to Costco on Sunday to check the prices of freeze pops and possibly buy them. This was a good plan until we got to Costco and realized that freeze pops are not only scarce at colleges in February - they are also scarce at stores. Costco didn't have any freeze pops and we couldn't find anything else that we were interested in so we decided to head to Wal-Mart to see if they had freeze pops.
Wal-Mart also didn't have freeze pops (apparently we're the only ones who think it's freeze pop season) but while we were at Wal-Mart we wandered down the freezer aisle and saw popsicles and fudgsicles. Popsicles and fudgsicles aren't quite as inexpensive as freeze pops, but they are still scarce around Olin and they have the same it's-almost-springtime appeal that freeze pops have so we decided to buy one box of popsicles and two boxes of fudgsicles to supplement the pizza we were planning on buying for the study break.
Buying popsicles and fudgsicles turned out to be a good idea and it worked well to get people to come to our study break. The appeal of the frozen treats along with pizza convinced nearly 80 people to come to our study break and we got lots of good suggestions for our project.