You're not buying a discount. You're buying a behaviour

Recently, I got into an argument with a friend of mine, a smart, rational individual.
He couldn’t believe I would pay ₹30 for delivery instead of just getting the food app’s loyalty program. “Dude, you're wasting money. You get free delivery. You get delivery priority. It’s stupid not to get the subscription.” he said.

He wasn’t comparing costs — he was treating spending less as a failure.

My actual observation began when we bought into one of those food delivery app memberships.
Free delivery. Discounts. Priority service.

My wife tracks our monthly expenses — pretty meticulously. And she pointed out something odd a month or two later:

"Our [food delivery app] spend has almost doubled."

Same account. Same eating habits. Just now... everything felt easier to justify.
We were still trying to “be frugal.” But we were ordering 2–2.5x more.

That’s when it clicked.
It’s not that these programs make ordering cheaper. It flips a mental switch. You stop associating the payment with “buying“, you think of it as “saving“.

There’s something subtle and dangerous about a price that reads “₹0”.
It creates a clean mental switch:

“I’m not spending money here. I’m saving money.”

That’s the bait.
And it sticks.

Even after we saw the spike in our own data, my wife didn’t want to cancel.

“₹30 for delivery still feels like a waste.”

This is someone incredibly disciplined, methodical, intentional with expenses and even she couldn’t pull the brake easily.

These programs don’t just reduce friction — they reframe your defaults.
And once that reframing is in place, the baseline behaviour shifts.

It’s not a failure of self-control.
It’s the cost of running human psychology.

Later, I asked a former Product Manager at that food delivery app if loyalty programs really changed user behavior. He confirmed what I’d suspected: across the board, spending went up — just like it had for me. Not just for heavy users, but everyone. That’s why they keep dropping the membership price as low as they can.

When you’re unsure whether you’re saving or not, they frame it as a guaranteed win. Suddenly, spending feels like saving. It doesn’t have to be logical to be effective.

Once you’ve “bought smart,” you want to stay that way. Every repeat action reinforces the story you’ve started telling yourself.

Charlie Munger might’ve called it the doubt-avoidance tendency, paired with inconsistency-avoidance.

These programs aren’t just riding that loop — they’re engineered for it.

So the next time a credit card offer or no-cost EMI shows up, maybe don’t rush to out-calculate it. You’re not just doing math — you’re stepping into a system built to work your human tendencies.

You don’t have to opt out entirely. Just don’t confuse convenience with a win. Know which side the house is on.