The Car Wash Card

Imagine two loyalty cards at a car wash. The first says: buy 8 washes, get 1 free. It has eight empty circles. The second says: buy 10 washes, get 1 free. It has ten circles, but two are already stamped.

Look closely and you’ll see they’re the same deal. Both require eight more washes. Nothing about the math is different. But people don’t behave like math.

The experiment

In 2006, marketing researchers Joseph Nunes and Xavier Drèze handed out 300 loyalty cards at a car wash. Half the customers got the blank eight-stamp card. Half got the ten-stamp card with two stamps already filled in.

Several months later, they counted how many people had earned their free wash. About 19% of the blank-card customers finished. Among the head-start customers, about 34% did. Nearly double the completions, for a card that asked for exactly the same number of visits. The head-start group also came back sooner between washes.

Nunes and Drèze called it the endowed progress effect: when people feel they’ve already made progress toward a goal, even progress that was simply given to them, they’re more likely to keep going.

Why a free head start works

The blank card frames the goal as something you haven’t started. The pre-stamped card frames it as something already underway, 20% complete. And an unfinished task feels different from an unstarted one. It pulls at you a little.

It also connects to an older idea called the goal-gradient effect. In the 1930s, psychologist Clark Hull noticed that rats in a maze ran faster the closer they got to the food. Decades later, a team led by Ran Kivetz tested this with a coffee shop reward card and found that customers bought coffee more often as they got closer to their free drink.

Put those together: the closer a goal feels, the harder we work toward it. And a head start makes every goal feel closer.

The catch

Endowed progress isn’t a magic trick. It seems to work best when the head start feels like genuine progress, rather than an arbitrary gift. It also can’t make an unwanted goal desirable. Nobody visits a car wash they don’t need just because a card has two stamps on it.

What it can do is help with the hardest part of almost any goal: getting started, and staying started.

Why every MIMR account starts with $25

Every MIMR member starts with $25 already in their cash bank. It unlocks after their first visit to the Recovery Room.

That’s the car wash card, applied to wellness. Your first visit doesn’t feel like step zero of a long program. It feels like completing something that’s already underway, because it is.

There’s a second effect at work too. Money that’s already yours feels different from money you might earn someday. Behavioral economists call this loss aversion: we tend to feel losses more strongly than equivalent gains. In one study, researchers gave teachers a bonus at the start of the school year, with the agreement that they’d return it if student performance didn’t improve. Their students’ math scores rose more than those of teachers offered the same bonus at the end of the year.

We don’t want anyone to feel pressured. But we do want that first visit to feel like claiming something that belongs to you, rather than signing up for something new.

Is this a trick?

We’d rather tell you exactly what we’re doing than hope you don’t notice. The $25 is designed to make the first step easier. It’s based on well-documented behavioral science. And the reason we’re explaining it in public is that this is what MIMR is built on: understanding what affects your behavior and your body, then using that knowledge on purpose.

After the first visit, the rest is up to you. You’ll get your baseline. You’ll see your numbers. And the next reward comes from something the car wash card never could: measurable proof that you’ve improved.