What Does It Take to Stop Checking Your Phone? A Bag With a Lock

Yondr sells pouches to lock up your phones at schools, concerts or anywhere they are hard to resist

By Cordilia James of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"It has come to this: We lack the willpower to stay off our phones, and we need physical barriers to stop us from using them. Enter Yondr, a maker of little bags for locking up your phone.

At schools, comedy clubs, concerts and other venues, the pouches cut off people from the screen without forcing them to surrender their phones.

Schools are struggling with children who can’t put down TikTok and YouTube, and lack in-person social skills. Musicians want their audiences to focus on them. Comedians want to stop joke theft or—even worse—have a joke that bombs go viral.

Some 25,000 people locked their phones into Yondr pouches at live shows in 2015, a year after the company launched, it says. By 2022, it was about six million. This year, the number of users is expected to surpass 10 million.

Here’s how it works: Once guests arrive at a show and present their tickets, Yondr workers or venue personnel ask them to silence their phones and place them in Yondr pouches. The staffers snap the bags shut, and guests take them inside.

Devices can still receive calls and messages, but to check them, guests have to step outside the venue or go to a cordoned-off phone-use area to have the bag unlocked. After the event, staffers quickly unlock and collect bags as guests exit." 

"Two schools in Torrington, Conn., started using Yondr bags a couple of years ago, paying $60,000 to use the pouches for roughly 2,000 students."

"More students chat with one another in the lunchroom and hallways since they can’t retreat to social media or music during moments of downtime"

The bag is "a neoprene-like material with a magnet-controlled locking mechanism."

"About 40% of Yondr’s revenue came from schools in 2023, and it is expected to reach 70% by the end of this year, a spokeswoman says. By fall 2023, more than one million students were using Yondr pouches across 21 countries"

This is an example of what economists call a “commitment device.” You do something now that will  control your behavior in the future. Like Odysseus being tied to the mast. Or putting your alarm clock on the other side of the room so you have to get up to turn it off.

Related posts:  

Would you pay someone to make you work hard? (2022)

Are payday-routine videos a commitment device? (2023)

How Odysseus Started The Industrial Revolution (2023) (Factory work may have been a commitment device to get everyone to work hard)