Keep in mind this wasn’t an established routine. If they had been buying Johnny snacks at this gas station every week for a year and suddenly stopped one week, there would be a question as to why they stopped. But according to the OP, the parents bought their son a bag a chips and a soda one time at this gas station.
I’m so curious…because this type of behavior goes against everything I’ve learned about marketing and sales. The overall model I’ve learned is Product —> Consumer Likes Product —> SALE! And it goes in a cycle. The cycle is only broken when the consumer stops liking the product or if the product is too expensive. Or poor customer service.
I think it depends on your customer. Some customers are more creatures of habit than others. Some customers experience a life change that in turn changes their habits. I’m guessing a lot of customer behavior is cyclical, but lots of people are trying to break certain cycles, whether to save money or be healthier or both.
Minor nitpick: I’ve never had a drug dealer who gave out free samples. [/nitpick]
Has Tom Lehrer lied to me? 
He gives the kids free samples
Because he knows full well
That today’s young innocent faces
Will be tomorrows … clientele.
It’s just not that simple in reality. Personally, I’m a creature that craves novelty and new things. I’m way more likely to try the flavor I’ve never had than to buy the one I’ve had and liked, just because I am always looking for ways to crawl out of my rut for a little while. I might pick up a new diet soda and like it, but just because I liked it doesn’t mean I want to keep having it over and over again. I can enjoy something without having to partake of it regularly.
The same goes for whole businesses. I might have a great meal at a restaurant and that makes me more likely to come back, but I’m not going to come back every time – I’m going to keep trying new places. Having good food means I’ll come back rather than avoid the place, but I’m not really the kind of person who becomes a “regular”. I’m off trying the next place over.
When it comes to kids, though, even as a non-parent, I’m very aware that doing something regularly becomes a point of entitlement, and it’s a good idea not to do that. A treat can just be a treat.
There’s an externality here that you’re not considering. The cost of the product to the customer includes the long-term health effects of the product. That adds to the cost for the customer for things like coffee drinks and snack foods.
For someone who wants to lose weight or save money, something like a daily coffee drink habit is low-hanging fruit. It’s something that is relatively simple to cut out. It doesn’t take nearly as much time or effort as something like counting calories/fat grams/carbs, exercising, or making a budget.
I’ll second this. And he certainly will be hearing about it!
Yeah, those After School Specials totally fuckin’ lied to us, man.
I do the same shit over and over. When I find something that I like, I stick with it.
If anyone has truly studied my life, they not only know where I’m having dinner tomorrow night, but what I’m ordering.
I would suck in the witness protection program.
As did my mom. When I was about to go off to college, her sage, pithy, insightful advice to me was “Don’t ever set your drink down and come back to it and drink it later. Someone might spike it with something.”
Four years later, just after my graduation, I confessed to mom, “You know, I hoped and prayed that someone would spike my drink and I left them all over the place and came back to them later. Not once did I ever get a good free acid trip out of an abandoned beer.” 
I think I see the sources of your confusion. First, you seem to think of Johnny as the consumer, because he is eating, or “consuming”, the snack. But in this case Johnny’s parents are are actually the consumer.
Second, you seem to think the parents have to defend their reasoning. But neither the salesman nor Johnny is even entitled to an explanation for their decision. The parents’ decision is not subject to the approval of anyone else.
The adult ate mishandled food 36 hours before drinking the iced coffee. Even though the coffee wasn’t to blame, shortly thereafter he began to suffer from food poisoning which had been developing for the previous day and a half. His brain, trying to prevent him from being poisoned in the future, developed a taste aversion to iced coffee so that in the future whenever he smelled it he felt nauseated. While the coffee was blameless it was the last thing his brain remembered smelling and tasting before he developed the food poisoning symptoms.
Me neither, despite always loudly announcing my intentions to take a long, long bathroom break while leaving my Mickey’s Big Mouth conspicuously unattended.
Allow me to explain.
We humans have a thing where we can weigh and measure costs vs value. So…and this may blow your mind; we can buy something, enjoy it (and here comes the mindfuck) sometimes still not think it worth buying again! :eek:
Just because we humans buy something once, and even enjoy it, doesn’t mean we’ll buy it every time. It might be that we don’t like the vendor, it might be that it’s inconvenient to buy it, even if it’s only ten steps out of our way. It might be that yeah, it was good, but it wasn’t $4.00 worth of good or it could be that sometimes we want the product…and sometimes we don’t.
That’s how you tell a human from a vending machine*. A vending machine does the same thing every time. Sometimes humans don’t.
Other than the fact that most humans aren’t rectangular, don’t have a plexiglass front, etc. Also, most humans don’t have a slot in their heads where you can put a quarter to get a delicious candy-bar.*
**My Uncle Morrie not withstanding. He thought he was a vending machine. But you don’t want to know what he gave out if we handed him a quarter.
BTW, I think either they’ve been teaching you wrong, or you weren’t listening. This is wrong.
The consumer buys a product, not because they “like” it (whatever that means) but because it meets a need they perceive they have. The need could be functional (I’m hungry and that’s food) or it could be emotional (I feel like a sucess driving a BMW), or it could be social (I’m reading this book for my bookclub). The need could be aspirational (education will help me get ahead in the future) or completely in the here and now (bandaids would be handy for this cut). The need could also be the need to identify with a group by making a political, social, or economic statement, like “I shop at small businesses because it’s better for my community” or “I choose American-made cars.” The need could be a jumble of several motivations.
If the product is not meeting any type of need they have or expect to have, they don’t buy it. If you don’t have a baby, do you go any buy a car seat, just because you “like it”?
When I was a kid, my parents took me to Disney World. We stayed for a whole week, and it was great. The next week, we didn’t go to Disney World! This was followed by many many more weeks of not going to Disney World.
Why had my parents stopped taking me to Disney World? Was it something I’d done? Had I disappointed them in some way? Or were they just cruel, mean people? Yes, that was it! I grew to hate them, to resent their very existence even as I relished plotting their bloody demise.
Then, a couple of years later, something extraordinary happened. *They took me to Disney World again! *Holy crap, what a mind-fuck! What was I to make of this? My parents had fooled me once, but I was not about to get sucked in again. The joke was on them, because I knew that in the future my non-Disney weeks would far outnumber my Disney weeks, so what was the point? I refused to have fun, or indeed to ever enjoy any special treat my parents gave me ever again, and grew to become a bitter, humorless adult.
I hope little Johnny’s parents will stop and think about what they’re doing to him by not getting him that soda and chips every damn week. My heart bleeds for that poor boy.
On the first visit, the total for the gas happened to be a round dollar figure that ended in 2 or 7. As the snack was $3, and the parents had forgotten their credit cards at home and were paying cash, this made payment simple.
On subsequent visits the parents used a credit card or the total was a non-multiple of an easily handled cash transaction.
I have sometimes made changes to my routine for no reason beyond, I was becoming a slave to habit. I don’t like the sense that I am that predictable, and I don’t like feeling controlled by routine.
So I just make a change for no good reason. Take a different route home from work, buy groceries at a different store. Drink a different beverage.
I kind of enjoy randomness I suppose.
Others have given good rationales as to why this is not true. I’ll just say this: you are grossly oversimplifying the purchasing model and I can’t tell if it’s purposeful or if it’s because you just don’t understand the material. But people don’t buy something just because they like it. So go back to your textbooks and figure it out. I guarantee you an expanded rationale is in there.