# The Amish Loyalty Program: A Case Study in Asking the Wrong Question

A farm store manager, possessed by the kind of motivational energy that only hits middle management at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday, tasked his daughter with a simple objective: sign up more loyalty reward members. The daughter, working checkout, encountered a small Amish community that shopped there occasionally. What followed was the retail equivalent of watching someone speedrun a tutorial they didn’t read.

The setup is exquisite. The Amish—a religious community that has spent four centuries perfecting the art of saying no to things—were now being asked to participate in a modern points-based consumption incentive system. This is not a cultural mismatch; this is a category error. One Reddit comment notes that someone once nervously asked an Amish customer for his driver’s license. He smiled and explained: “I do not drive.” The daughter’s boss, apparently working from a playbook written for people who have never encountered humans with actual convictions, had simply not accounted for this variable. Another commenter offered the logical endgame: “Handwritten emails delivered by the pony express.” Which, to be fair, is more reliable than most SaaS onboarding flows.

The real comedy lives in the specifics. A comment mentions that most Amish sects are allowed phones—just not in their homes. They have communal “phone shacks” with shared landlines. Some have solar chargers for cell phones. They are not Luddites; they are engineers of inconvenience, which is a completely different beast. They’ve made cost-benefit calculations that the modern world finds baffling. A loyalty rewards number requires either a phone number, email, or home address—the digital equivalent of asking someone to move in with your marketing database. The Amish customer didn’t need to refuse. He just had to exist in his own framework while the daughter held a clipboard in hers, both parties waiting for the other to speak a language they understood.

The moral isn’t that the boss was stupid—though the diagnosis fits. It’s that he’d optimized his instructions for a general population without running a control group. He’d shipped a patch for everyone without testing edge cases. The daughter was left executing a mandate that collided with reality at checkout, which is where most corporate ideas go to get humbled. And somewhere, an Amish man bought his feed or tools or whatever, left the store exactly as he came in, and went home to a life where loyalty programs don’t exist. He won. He just didn’t know there was a game.