Bigfoot Cookies on trouvé

Bigfoot Cookies has the widest reach of anything on the Missoula map, which is a polite way of saying the cookie is the reward people actually walk across town for. It is a quarter-pound cookie. They bake them downtown. You claim it at the counter, and the only time it leaves the case is when you are standing there.

Most of the drops on the map get a handful of claims a week. The cookie gets the most. First-timers, people showing the app to a friend, someone who has already been to Worden's and still wants a reason to keep walking: they end up here. Afternoons and evenings, two to eight, the shop is the kind of busy that means you might wait a minute and then you will not mind.

A cookie is a dumb reward until you watch what it does. It puts a person on Higgins who was not going to be on Higgins. It puts them in a shop that is not a chain. And then, more often than not, they buy a second one for later. That is the network in miniature, and it happens to taste like chocolate.