You awake to the roar of an African lion. Bleary-eyed, you grab your phone and hit snooze to silence the feline’s growls — and in doing so, donate $1 to a conservation fund.
That’s the premise of an app called Zooster, the world’s first “charitable alarm clock.” After the howl of a grey wolf or the squeak of a dolphin wakes you from your beauty sleep, you can either dismiss the alarm or hit snooze. If you do the latter, the app automatically donates your money to a charity that supports the animal whose wake-up call you ignored.
Sure, you might not be prepared to make informed monetary decisions in your state of morning grogginess — but at least it’s for a good cause, right? This leads us to the crucial problem with Zooster: Wouldn’t donating to a terrible cause get you up faster?
Introducing Eschewster: the app that will help you abstain from hitting snooze and donating a dollar. We brainstormed some ideas for the world’s second charitable alarm clock that’ll get you out from under those covers in a hurry:
- Get up now or $1 goes to the NRA
- Get up now or $1 goes to the travel budget of that dentist who killed Cecil
- Get up now or $1 goes to the Rachel Dolezal Center For Diversity
- Get up now or $1 goes to expanding George W. Bush’s personal Texas ranch
- Get up now or $1 goes to a climate denial group of your choice
- Get up now or $1 goes to developing toilet paper even thinner than one-ply
- Get up now or $1 goes to Kanye West’s debt reduction fund
- Get up now or $1 goes to the making of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 3
- Get up now or $1 goes to the initiative to build an even bigger proposed pipeline, Keystone XXL
App developers, take note! Until Zooster’s official launch this fall, we could use some extra incentive to get up in the mornings. It’s not exactly the cock-a-doodle-do that served as the alarm for your agrarian ancestors, but the moral of the story is the same: If you snooze, you lose.
(That is, unless you end up snoozing and donating to Grist.)
