Four streaks, all of them forgiving, and one that is deliberately impossible to lose.
A streak is the most effective retention mechanic ever invented and the easiest one to turn into a small daily source of guilt. These four are built to be survivable, because the alternative is a member who misses a day in March and never opens the app again.
The four streaks.
| Streak | What keeps it | Grace | Longest here |
|---|---|---|---|
| The season | One check-in or one order per calendar month | A whole month off, once a year | 31 months |
| The box | A box received without being skipped | Two skips a year, no questions | 19 boxes |
| The archive | One chapter read a week while you are working through it | Pauses entirely if you stop | 40 weeks |
| The parish | Simply having an account | None needed. It cannot be broken | 3 years |
Why every streak here has a grace period.
The classic streak has no mercy in it. Miss a day, lose two hundred days, feel briefly terrible, and — if the research on this is anything to go by — stop using the thing entirely rather than start again from one.
That works for a language app with tens of millions of users, where the people it drives away are replaced. It does not work for a farm shop with a membership scheme, where the people it drives away were also the people who bought the jam.
So the monthly streak has a whole month of grace once a year. The box streak allows two skips, which is roughly one holiday and one bad month. The archive streak pauses rather than breaking. And the parish streak cannot break at all.
What happens when you are about to lose one.
At seven days left
One notification, if you have that switch on. It says what would keep it and how long you have.
At two days left
One more. That is the last one, and there is no third.
On the day it breaks
Nothing. No message, no commiseration, no offer. Being told you have failed at shopping is not a service.
Afterwards
The previous streak length stays on your profile permanently as a best, and a new one starts at one.
If you want none of it
One switch turns streaks off entirely, including the counting.
The four streak marks.
Four more marks, on the same terms as the other sixteen: they unlock nothing.
The archive streak is the only one anybody has ever complained about, on the grounds that forty weeks is a long time to be told what to read.
A streak should be a record of something you were doing anyway, not a reason to do it. Every one of these four is built around behaviour that already existed — walking into the shop, taking the box, reading the archive — with a number attached to it. The moment we design one that requires a daily visit to a website, it will be because we have run out of better ideas.
Streaks, questioned.
No, and we are not going to sell you a repair. Streak insurance is the point at which this stops being a bit of fun and starts being a mechanic with a price list.
Only if it is delivered to you. A box you gave somebody else keeps their streak going, not yours, which several people have found annoying.
January, mostly. Or a hospital stay, or a house move. It exists because life happens and a loyalty scheme should not have an opinion about it.
The badges themselves.
Sixteen of them, seven earned, and every locked one showing its condition.
