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Honesty is still the best policy Businesses use honor system and most customers adhere Sunday, October 18, 1998 By Torsten Ove, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
The woman walked into Brian Webber's snack shop in the State Office Building, Downtown, grabbed a hot chocolate and a bagel and went up to the cash register.
"Any cream cheese on that bagel?" asked Webber, 40, the proprietor.
"No," she said, handing over a bill. "That's a 20."
"Thank you," said Webber, making the change with practiced precision. "Have a great day."
It was just another routine transaction at Webber's shop.
But it was remarkable in one sense. Webber is blind. And if he doesn't use his electronic bill identifier on the counter, he can't tell if you're handing him a $1 or $100 bill.
Usually, he just trusts you to tell him the truth about what you're buying and how much money you hand him.
And guess what? Almost everyone does.
"Ninety-nine and three-quarters percent of the people are honest," Webber said. "There is that element that will try to rip me off. But most people are fair and honest."
That may be hard to believe in this cynical age.
This is the country where the president is facing possible impeachment for lying, where gas station clerks hide behind bulletproof glass, where you have to show identification to board an airplane and where you must be cleared by state police to serve as a school chaperone.
Yet somehow, in small ways and sometimes in unexpected places, the honor system endures.
Take Giant Eagle. At the bakery, you can fill your bag with seven bagels but tell them you got six, and they won't check. In the candy aisle, you can take a piece of candy and not drop a coin in the metal box provided and no beefy security guard will wrestle you to the floor.
"The spirit of our operation is that the vast majority of people are fundamentally honest," said Joe Faccenda, senior vice president. "We're liberal in that sense."
So are lots of places. At many produce stores, employees leave the Halloween pumpkins out all night with the realization that someone might steal or smash them. Newspaper boxes depend entirely on the honesty of customers. And at Office Depot, employees won't count the copies you make at their copying machines; they'll just take your word for how many you made.
"That's been our policy since we opened our first store in 1986 -- you trust the customer," said Gary Schweikhart, Office Depot's vice president of public relations in Del Rey Beach, Fla. "I haven't seen any wild-eyed people in our stores, making 12 copies but only paying for eight."
It's a little thing, trusting people with copies that cost only pennies, and it's good public relations.
Customers reaffirmed
But honesty starts at ground level.
Those who monitor this sort of thing say Americans are hardly the cheating, what's-in-it-for-me curmudgeons cynics like to believe they are.
"From everything I'm seeing, individuals are paying more attention and saying, 'Hey, the buck starts with me,"' said Marty Taylor, vice president of corporate services for the Institute for Global Ethics in Camden, Maine.
"My son asked a question recently: How come people don't take two newspapers (from a street box)? We talked about the concept of ethics, and why that's just something that's not done. He's 16. He understands. It's just not done."
Well, sometimes it is.
Dave Stolar, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's single sales manager, said employees noticed missing papers from many of the company's 1,600 machines.
"I've seen people do it," he said. "I go up to them and say, 'I'd really appreciate it if you would just take one."'
But the vast majority of people don't pilfer papers, honoring the philosophy of what Taylor calls "obedience to the unenforceable" that is the essence of ethics.
The same idea is at work at Blockbuster Video, where each store has a phone for customers to make local calls. The idea is to allow people to consult with the family about choosing a video.
"They use it quite a bit, surprisingly more than I thought they would," said Paul Soscia, executive vice president for local franchises. "Occasionally, you'll get a teen-ager who makes (too many) calls, but it's so rare."
Some businesses trust their customers to such an extent that it almost seems foolish.
At the Raleigh-Durham Airport in North Carolina, the owners of The Book Cellar leave thousands of used books unattended on shelves. If someone wants one, they're supposed to put money into a padlocked box. Almost everyone does.
In fact, people without enough cash have taken books and sent a check by mail after they land at their destination.
"I'm sure we lose some books, but it's a great draw. People love it," said co-owner Walter High. "The primary point is that customers feel reaffirmed that we're willing to do this."
High can't explain why the store doesn't get cheated.
It's 'the work ethic'
One reason might be that people who read have sturdier moral fiber than the TV-addled masses.
Or that people are less willing to steal from a store that sells something for less than an inflated airport price.
Or maybe it's just geography.
"We had people come into the store and say, 'In New Jersey, all your books would be gone the first day,"' High said. "I don't want to cast aspersions on the Northeast, but it may have something to do with the South. I don't know."
Some restaurant owners also are alarmingly trusting. If you want wine at the Olive Garden, you pay $3.25 and the waitress brings you a glass and the bottle. When you pay your bill, they ask you how many glasses you drank. You could drink the whole bottle and say "one," and no one will question you.
At the Century Inn in Scenery Hill, a legendary bed-and-breakfast on Route 40, the owners have begun accepting credit cards in the past two years. But before that, it used to happen fairly often that someone didn't have enough cash to pay. So customers mailed a check when they got home.
"I think in the 15 years Mrs. (Megin) Harrington (the owner) has been associated with the restaurant, she's been stuck once," said Jim Shaw, the chef. "I don't know if I would do that at Denny's or King's, but it seems our customers are squeakingly honest."
Customers like Tom Clemmens of Canonsburg.
Not long ago, he had dinner at the Century with a friend, but he realized too late that he didn't have enough cash for the bill. He doesn't carry a credit card, so he told Harrington that he was a little short. No problem, she said, just send us a check. Clemmens said he wouldn't dream of stiffing a place where a handshake is as good as a signature. Why so honest?
"I was born that way," he said. "It's called the work ethic."
In some cases, whole institutions run on the honor system.
Public transit in Europe, for example. Instead of shelling out cash when you board the train, you carry a rail pass that lets you ride anytime, anywhere. Conductors occasionally check to see if passengers have passes, but it's possible for the dishonest to ride a long time without being caught.
Yet the system is rarely abused.
Blind faith
In St. Louis, where the MetroLink operates on the same principle, compliance is about 95 percent. Buffalo, San Jose, Sacramento and other U.S. cities have adopted the idea, and locally the Port Authority is considering it for the South Hills line.
The conventional wisdom holds that people are less honest than they used to be.
And it's not hard to find examples of decaying trust.
Even Taylor of the Institute for Global Ethics, who describes himself as an optimist, can cite one. A marina near his office in Maine has a diesel pump for public use that used to be open at all hours. For years, boaters and motorists would pump their fuel and drop money through a slot in the door or leave an IOU. But then someone began abusing the system, and now the pump is locked up after hours.
To read some surveys, you'd think the world is on the edge of a moral meltdown.
In its 1998 Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth, the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Marina del Ray, Calif., reported that 47 percent of high-schoolers said they'd stolen something from a store at least once in the last 12 months. Of course, you can't even trust the survey, because it also says 31 percent of the respondents lied answering one or more of the questions.
The Institute for Global Ethics Web site features a poll that asks visitors if the "moral barometer" in their country is falling or rising. Seventy-five percent of visitors say it's falling.
But is it?
"If you put a bunch of people into a room and force them to take both sides, everyone takes the negative at first," Taylor said. "But as they go on, people realize that there's a lot of positive behavior."
The knee-jerk negative reaction seems rooted in the idea that yesterday was somehow better than today. But that may have more to do with a faulty memory than reality.
"Part of the reason people don't believe (in the honesty of other people) is the mythical sense of what the past was like, that we were governed by some moral code. That's not the case," said Kathleen Blee, a professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. "The image that people are self-interested agents looking out for themselves is a stereotype of the modern industrial society. You can think of plenty of examples, even in commercial transactions, that are based on trust."
Like the transactions at Brian Webber's cash register.
Webber isn't naive. If a stranger says he has a big bill, he'll put it in the bill identifier. And he's been victimized. Last winter, he caught five people trying to cheat him.
He prosecuted one. But the others told him they'd just made a mistake, and Webber let things go at that.
It wasn't enough to ruin his faith.
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