But quite apart from not being able to stop locals stealing vegetables from the fields at night, the farm I worked at last summer in Massachusetts had a 24 hour stand run on the honour system. Shortly before I arrived it was discovered that someone was stealing the money from the jar, and the man who owned the farm responded by installing the fakest looking fake CCTV camera I have ever seen. It had a working red light on it, at least. I still believe it was a decoy, and the real camera was inside a hallowed out watermelon or something.

also @COPPERPIXIE in Prague you can pay a fee and get a license to collect fines for getting on the trains and trollys without paying. all those people are sort of freelance meter maids and they all take bribes…

If you needed a paper, you could then buy it from the “homeless” guy on the corner.

I frequently do artwork that requires 23K gold leaf. I live in the city and this place is in the suburbs. It’s a father and son business. I phone in my order, sometimes as much as a few hundred bucks at a time. They rush my gold off within a day and the package contains a bill. I’ve not always paid right away and they’ve never complained. They just absolutely trust that I’ll pay sooner or later.

(Of course, I have no idea what the penalty for getting caught without a ticket is, so that may be part of it.)

It’s not really an honour system, commuters are making a trade off between how much it costs to buy a ticket, and the cost of a fine/likelihood of being caught if they don’t.

In most of the ex Soviet states the cost of getting on a tram or metro is so reasonable it’s not really worth the risk, whereas in Scandinavia public transport costs are really, really high, so it’s possibly more worth the risk.

The annoying thing is that in the UK public transport is shockingly inadequate, shockingly expensive, and if i get on a train i have to produce my ticket a minimum of 3 times before i complete a journey.

Bah!

At ‘community acupuncture’ clinics, people are very simply asked to pay what they can afford (w/o income verification of any kind) and people do just that.

The sliding scale at CA clinics runs from $15-40/visit – where market rates for acupuncture across the US average ~ $75/visit at last check.

There are about 50 such full-time clinics (independently owned) across the US.

(Full disclosure: I am a community acupuncturist (in Manchester, NH) and a CAN board member)

We always ride out bikes there to get corn or peppers or squash or whatever for dinner.

He just has a little lock box with a slot to slide money into.

My parents buy their eggs from a farmer near their home. Pull up to the farm house, and inside the farmer’s garage is a fridge with cartons of eggs in it. Go right inside the garage door, put money in the jar, return some egg cartons if you have them, and get a fresh dozen from the fridge.

Most people are cooperators, but you gotta watch out for that 1% to 3%, by not giving them a chance to do major damage to the system.

Also now I want to carry around a watermelon with a camera hidden inside it.

There are no less than six roadside “honor system” stands within a five-minute drive, offering various things like home-grown produce, home-farmed honey, and cut firewood.

The produce stands generally start showing-up every year in the late summer/early fall as people’s gardens start to harvest, and stay open so long as they’ve got produce left to sell.

Considering these same families run these things year-after-year, and always just run them by leaving their “merchandise” and cash box unattended next to the road, I’d have to say such honor payment systems work quite well.

Needless to say, this is a suburban/semi-rural setting, so YMMV elsewhere.

it was fun

So anyway, I say, “Hey waitress, this coffee tastes like mud”. She says, “It ought to, it was ground just this morning.”

Ouch. That hurt to write.

Besides this unique selling method, the rest of Bart’s Books is worth a visit. It’s a great little used book store, and they always seem to have an author or poet visiting.

In the midst of the this madness, they still employ an honors system to pay for food orders. No written bills are given, you are on your honor to accurately relay your order to the cashier.

* while researching this comment I found that some person named, “Oprah” also happens to think this is one of the top 20 burgers in the US, go figure.