Economics

Switching Costs

You are already inside the first bed. Mint brushes your calf. A spade leans where you left it, its handle polished by your hand. Across a low brick wall, the next plot looks richer — a small tree throws clean shade, leaves waxy and green. Set into the capstone, a thin board reads friction of moving. You lift a knee to climb, then notice what that means: crushed seedlings, dirt on your cuffs, tools to fetch, labels to rewrite. You pause with your hand outstretched, and keep weeding where you started.

Switching costs are the extra work of leaving after you have settled in. They show up as lost playlists, loyalty points that evaporate, a number or email you would have to abandon, the afternoon you would spend exporting photos and passwords. Some are money — termination fees, cancellation hoops — but most are time, habit, and the history embedded in a place. Firms grow them on purpose; we grow them by training our fingers to one set of shortcuts. The next garden can be better and still be ignored because the first garden owns your hands.

Therefore

Before you choose, ask what it would take to leave. If you want freedom, keep exit cheap; if you want loyalty, make staying unmistakably easier than going.

A small reminder, on a billing page or a laptop lid, that the hardest part of moving is the wall you build when you begin.