As always, we try to bring you the best and latest in honor-payment commerce schemes. Here’s one from a town called Settle in North Yorkshire, England:
A shopkeeper in North Yorkshire who wanted a day off on Boxing Day decided to leave his store open and let his customers help themselves.
Tom Algie, who runs the Practically Everything hardware store in Settle, returned to work at the end of the day to find an honesty box full of money.
“It was stuffed with notes and coins,” said Mr Algie. “There was £187 in it and two euros, which is pretty good.”
Grateful shoppers had also left notes thanking him for trusting them.
That’s from a BBC article; here’s another take, with better pictures, from the Daily Mail.
There used to be some very robust comments at the Daily Mail article, but they seem to have been erased. My guess is that the comments descended into name-calling, since an early round of comments that I read implied that such honesty could only happen in a small town where certain types of people — you know who they are, wink wink — don’t come around.
Here’s another bit from the Daily Mail piece:
[The owner's] note read: “Yes, I have given everyone the day off, including me, so please choose the items you want and place the right money inside, Merry Christmas.”
Customers also left notes saying what goods they had bought, and this, combined with a quick check of his stock, confirmed that Mr. Algie’s trust was not abused.
Instead of being behind the counter, the divorcee had spent the day with his son Joe, 23, and daughter Beth, 18.
I wonder how well Mr. Algie would do if he trusted his customers on a regular basis. One of the things that kept the Bagel Man’s customers honest was the threat that he would pull their precious supply of bagels and donuts if they slipped below an acceptable rate. Are the goods in a hardware store as precious?
(Hat tip: Marcus Fardoe and Rachael Churchill)
and 
. You can also watch it on 
How in the world does someone who sets up something like this control his inventory? If they have bar scanners that helps, but the number of sku’s at a hardware store must be very large, and I would bet that many of the small items such as nuts and bolts would end up in the bag for free.
We’ve done this at concerts, when we don’t rent a gsm-creditcard-pay-thingamajig, just when people haven’t got cash (who has cash on hand, these days), we just hand out a slip of paper with the bank numbers and such, so people could transfer the money for the ticket, electronically. Works about 95% of the time, here in Reykjavík
(not all Icelanders are crooks, you see…)
it could work in this case because
a) people buying in boxing day are different (more honest?) than the average customer
b) a customer that arrives to the store thinks: “there must be something wrong here, the owner must be taping me. I better pay, I don’t want my picture in the small town newspaper”
c) the owner thinks it worked because he saw the jar full of money and messages, but he haven’t checked his inventory
A local chiropractor couldn’t be bothered with insurance and other issues when he first started his practice….so he set up an honesty box system– pay me what you think I’m worth.
He did quite well!
There are two main factors at work with the success of honesty systems. One is the non-monetary incentives to avoid cheating which you’ve got into extensively. The second is the scope of potential benefits to a cheater. For instance, a jewelry store could almost never use an honestly system because even if vast majority of the population were honest, the small proportion who were not could easily steal hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of goods in one visit. For hardware or muffins, it’s much less of a problem because there’s only so much of either that you can want for your personal use, and it’s time consuming to sell them.
This matters in the case of the free provision of some goods by the government. Free tap water relies on a sort of honesty system – that you’ll be considerate of others and won’t excessively waste it. It does have the advantage of there rarely being highly lucrative opportunities to use it – it’d be difficult to sell off a lot of water. However, it has the disadvantage of having few non-financial incentives not to waste it – the costs are generally spread amongst a large group of mostly strangers, and most household water consumption is done outside the watch of peers.
Interesting about the Daily Mail article comments. For info if the Daily Mail was sold in the USA it would be read by the type of people who think Sarah Palin would have made a good VP.
On Queensday, the national holiday of the Netherlands, all of Amsterdam turns into the largest garage sale on earth. It´s mostly kids selling off any old toys and stuff their parents donate. It´s good fun, great haggling, and a little spare pocket change (usually spent the same day on other useless toys from other kids selling them….)
Many moons ago, after having done this for a couple of years, when I was 13 I felt a bit old for it, and decided to do one last experiment – I put everything out, with a big sign ´does Amsterdam have honest people?´
The results where amazing – I took in three times as much money as normal (inflaction corrected about 200 euros – then and now a huge sum for a 13y old) – as nobody haggled but paid sticker price.
As far as I could notice, nothing was stolen.
There are quite a few ´pay what you think is fair´restaurants in Europe now, and they also always receive more then they would based on a menu/price system.
Interesting lessons here…
I think our friendly proprietor should be careful letting out the news–I’m sure the government over there will find some way to declare this sort of thing illegal.