I went to the town hall today to renew my recreation ID. It’s the sort of bureaucratic errand people mentally prepare themselves for. You expect it to cost more than it should, take longer than it should, and involve someone behind a desk acting as if your request is a personal inconvenience.
I was also signing my kids up for summer camp, so I expected a little friction. Instead, the woman working the Parks & Rec desk was pleasant. She explained each step as we went. The process was organized. The camps were still more expensive than I would prefer, but compared with private options they were actually a relative bargain.
In other words, the experience was normal. Smooth, even. And that should have been the end of it. But as we finished, she asked a question I wasn’t expecting.
Coffee cake or crumb cake?
Not whether I wanted one but which one?
Obviously I picked crumb. She disappeared briefly behind the office door and came back holding an individually wrapped Entenmann’s crumb cake. She smiled, handed it over, and told me to enjoy the rest of my day.
I left town hall having spent nearly a thousand dollars on summer camp registrations and somehow walked out smiling.
The crumb cake did something interesting. Without it, I would have left mildly surprised that the experience wasn’t frustrating. With it, the entire interaction became something I told my wife about when I got home.
The treat reframed the whole thing.
The Treat Effect
Small, unexpected rewards at the end of an experience can disproportionately shape how we remember it.
In 1993, psychologists Daniel Kahneman, Barbara Fredrickson, and colleagues published a study with an arresting title: "When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End."¹ They asked participants to submerge a hand in 14°C water for 60 seconds, then repeat the exercise with the other hand for 90 seconds, the final 30 at a slightly warmer 15°C. Given the choice of which to repeat, most chose the longer, objectively more painful version. The only difference: a slightly better ending.
Psychologists sometimes describe this as the peak-end rule: People do not remember experiences as an average of every moment. They tend to remember two things:
1. The Emotional Peak
2. The Ending
Everything else compresses. Research comparing people’s experienced and remembered happiness has repeatedly found that the memory of an experience is shaped far more by a few key moments than by the average of every minute that occurred.²
A routine experience followed by a pleasant ending can feel much better in memory than an actually better experience that ends neutrally.³ The crumb cake did not improve the paperwork. It did not lower the price of camp.
It simply changed the ending. And the ending rewrote the story.
Why Treats Work
A treat works because it breaks the script. Most required or transactional experiences have predictable emotional arcs. You enter slightly defensive. You expect indifference. You expect rules, forms, and mild friction.
When the final moment violates that script in a positive way, the contrast is amplified. The treat is also unearned in a specific way. It is not a discount negotiated through effort. It is not a reward for loyalty points accumulated over time. It is simply given.
That small asymmetry matters. Gifts feel different from transactions.⁴
The Economics of Tiny Generosity
From a cost perspective, the crumb cake probably cost the town less than a dollar. Yet it produced a result that thousands of dollars of customer experience spending rarely accomplishes. It created a story someone retold later that day.
Many organizations chase customer satisfaction through expensive structural improvements. New software. New facilities. New systems. But memory is not engineered through averages. It is shaped through moments. Sometimes the most efficient moment is the smallest one: A cookie at the end of a hotel stay. A warm towel at a barbershop. A mint with the restaurant bill.
These gestures cost almost nothing. Yet they alter the emotional recall of the entire interaction.
🤯Entenmann’s, the brand of the crumb cake I chose mostly because I remembered it fondly from childhood, started in Brooklyn in 1898 as a horse-drawn bakery delivery route.⁵ Their crumb cake became famous for a simple reason. The crumb topping was intentionally excessive. Early bakers even described the recipe as “over-crumbed”, meaning there was nearly as much crumb topping as cake underneath.
In its own way, the bakery had stumbled onto the same principle that made the town hall moment memorable. When the final layer is disproportionately generous, people tend to remember the whole thing more fondly.
Where Treats Are Disappearing
Interestingly, treats used to be more common. Banks gave out lollipops to children. Airlines handed out meals and cocktails.
Over time, operational efficiency trimmed away many of these small indulgences. The logic was straightforward. Each one cost money and did not directly produce revenue. But what also disappeared in the accounting spreadsheet was a type of memory dividend.
The treat may not increase revenue directly, but it increases the probability that someone leaves with a smile instead of a grumble, a story instead of a receipt.
No Such Thing as Over-Crumbed
The town hall almost certainly didn’t design that crumb cake offering around Kahneman. Someone just thought it would be a nice thing to do. And they were right, for reasons they probably couldn’t have fully articulated: how disproportionately powerful small closing gestures are in shaping perception. Most organizations try to improve experiences by smoothing the middle. They invest in process improvements, speed, or efficiency. But people mainly remember the end. Which raises a strange possibility. If you want an experience to feel better, it may not require redesigning the entire system, you might only need a crumb cake at the end.