Thread by @patio11

Chargespot currently has a promotion where if you rent it from a 7/11 specifically it will cost 1 yen (a bit less than a penny) for up to 48 hours.

This was fantastic until they started promoting the promotion with push notifications, and now there are ~0 chargers available.

https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1443034267810816002

On one hand, great demonstration of microecon 101. I was contributing to the problem; I'd just rent a new one on spec every morning regardless of whether I'd need it because I go to my local convenience store daily anyway and might need walking-around power at some point.

So I guess my advice is Charge More so people can charge more?

OK, obligatory joke out of the way, here's the reason why they'd give this service away for a month: 7/11 is fairly clearly paying them to, to buy foot traffic. Each rental/return cycle causes two trips in.

Which also explains why they'd be willing to burn a push notification on this promotion even for relatively active users of the service when it costs money, versus e.g. spending the development time and user attention on direct revenue generation.

Somewhat ironically, I considered walking an extra 20 meters to the next convenience store ("Tokyo problems") this morning because they're not 7/11 and so I assumed [+] they'd have power available for rental.

[+] Of course it's in the app but I'm a bit lazy w/r/t convenience.