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Honesty and your Wallet
I read this story and had a vague sense of deja vu.
Artist Jillian May had a simple idea: for two weeks last month, she set out baked goods on an unmanned table on Dean Street with a sign that asked customers to deposit 25 cents in a jar.
[...] May came up with “Conzept Kiosk” during a residency last year on a small Finnish island, where unmanned roadside kiosks are common. She made her own and started selling American-style treats to the Finns — and at the end of every day, sure enough, she always found the right amount of money for the number of sweets taken.
Then I realized I had actually read it before, sort of, in the form of the bagel experiment described in Freakonomics.
The bagels had begun as a casual gesture: a boss treating his employees whenever they won a new research contract. Then he made it a habit. Every Friday, he would bring half a dozen bagels, a serrated knife, some cream cheese. When employees from neighboring floors heard about the bagels, they wanted some, too. Eventually he was bringing in 15 dozen bagels a week. He set out a cash basket to recoup his costs. His collection rate was [initially] about 95 percent; he attributed the underpayment to oversight.
And then, again, when the idea was applied to mp3s.
[...] If we accept Socrates’ theory that people are basically honest, even without someone forcing them to be, and we look at Paul Feldman’s 87% average collection rate, what can we learn about the entertainment industry going to the wall because of file sharing?
The RIAA would be better off stopping the sue ‘em all campaign and putting a PayPal button on their website.
I like the idea of the unmanned kiosk despite deeply ingrained notions of distrust and skepticism that come from living in this city. I want it to work, like a child wants her lemonade stand to be a big neighborhood hit. Except it’s not my lemonade stand, and there’s no little girl pouring the lemonade.
Indeed, after a rough start, May said she began to see the better side of humanity, noting that area residents, workers and business owners began protecting her kiosk (and money) when the cookies and cupcakes ran out each day.
A similar effort was made by the City Cafe Bakery in Kitchener, Ontario.
“I liked the idea of simplifying things and … the honour system made a whole lot of sense,” Bergen says. “What irritated me about going into Tim Hortons, for example, was waiting in line for something as simple as getting a donut and a coffee. So the thought was, someone can pour his own coffee, grab his own bagel, cut it himself, throw the money in, and walk out. We don’t touch 60 per cent of the transaction.”
As a brick and mortar business, City Cafe escaped the suspicion May refers to, of kindness in an urban environment. Still, her Conzept Kiosk did develop a significant number of regular fans, and since she set out to do it as a social experiment and art project more than as a business, why not call it a success?