I know in Japan for instance, there’s a unmanned store where you can buy things with the only thing meeting you near the front entrance & exit is self checkout. It’s a trust based system where you walk in select what you want (without locking any essential or mundane item behind plexiglass), as in they depend on individuals having common sense on not stealing paying via a “honesty box” based on a honor system.

  • TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    29 days ago

    Won’t work in most cities.

    This is common enough in very small towns not on main highways, though, where everyone knows everyone, and many of them are relatives.

    I imagine in mob-controlled neighborhoods, in cities, where everyone knows who owns the store and no one would dare steal from it, it would work. But, that might be fiction.

  • Aeao@lemmy.world
    1·
    29 days ago

    I’m a retail manager. I’ve managed a lot of places.

    One thing I’ve always said is “we could probably leave a bucket here for everyone to pay as they left. 9 out of ten people would be honest, the tenth tho would take the whole bucket.”

    I don’t think it would work in America. Also with current events I no longer feel 9 of the ten would be trustworthy anymore.

  • justdaveisfine@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    29 days ago

    Depends on what’s being sold and where its at.

    People set up honor systems like these for plant seeds, books, wood logs, etc and they all seem to work alright.

    I couldn’t see it working well for anything easily resellable (with decent profit) as someone would likely exploit it.

    • chaotic_disorganizer@lemmy.world
      1·
      29 days ago

      Let’s n8t forget they were lying out of their ass from the very beginning. The “highly advanced AI” that was supposed to detect what items you took turned out to actually be a few hundred indians manually classifying each item.