June 09, 2004
What the bagel man saw
- An economist gave up his job to sell bagels to companies on the honor system and tracked all the data. "By measuring the money collected against the bagels taken, he could tell, down to the penny, just how honest his customers were. Did they steal from him? If so, what were the characteristics of a company that stole versus a company that did not? Under what circumstances did people tend to steal more, or less?" (NYT, Reg inside)
NYT registration: user: mofite, pw: monkey
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Good article. It's just too bad the bagel guy never delivered to Enron Headquarters. Now THAT would've been a case study...
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Great story. Bottom line, and best lesson from the article: honest people are honest, and cheaters will cheat, regardless of circumstances.
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Fascinating; a great read. Thanks. I think that a similar experiment in my office would be less successful. We are a small office and, by his findings, we should be "high" payers, but I doubt that. People here have a history of shirking responsibility at every turn, and I think this would be no different. Still, it's an interesting business model. I really like it. On an entirely offtopic note, BugMeNot does a great job at scaring up logins for reg. req'd. sites. You can even drag the following bookmarklet to your favorites menu to automate the process:
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Fascinating story. It shows that some good academic work can be attained from unlikely sources. Sort of like when a container full of toys fell off a ship from Korea. Where the toys washed ashore helped scientists to chart the flow of ocean currents.
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I knew about BugMeNot, but I haven't been able to get to it all day so I decided to register for my monkey friends instead. Here at my office, every Friday is a charity jeans day. The woman who collects money is in a bind because there are some people who don't pay, but if she says anything it would ruin it for everyone. It's just so unfortunate.
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This story was great, and mirrors my own experiences in retail management. Employee theft was always worse when the staff was large and/or morale was low.
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Why doesn't the slashdot password work at this link? Do they keep deleting it?
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Great article, cheers.
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Oh, that was great reading. First thing I thought of was the scene in Clerks where he's busy giving his girlfriend a manicure behind the cashier counter and leaves a sign up for people to leave change for their papers and coffee. To paraphrase: Veronica: "Aren't you afraid of someone taking the money?" Dante: "Nah, people see a pile of money, they assume someone's watching them." Veronica: "Honesty through paranoia?" Dante: "You got it."
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Kimberly, what's a charity jeans day?
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You're allowed to wear jeans if ou pay some money to charity, I expect.
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Is this common? Sounds barbaric.
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I guess I shouldn't just leave it at a throw-away comment like that... you should give to charity because you want to, not because you're going to be the only person in the office wearing dress pants. The whole idea seems distasteful to me.
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We used to have "Mufti Day" at school, right through to my last year, where you could wear normal, non-uniform clothes on a Friday and pay a gold-coin donation. Not everyone paid, but the odd person wearing their uniform on those days was teased unmercifully. (Why yes, I am the product of an all-girl school.)
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My experience, working for a little over a year in a Calif. state hospital for retarded (that's what we called them) children, is that people will act as their management expects them to. The chain of command saw all of us as thieves and worse, and made that perfectly clear during training. And, perfectly normal people that I had known in high school bragged about stealing food and drugs intended for the patients. I truly don't think they'd have done that in a different environment. I remember a supervisor who would buy really ugly plastic shoes for her family for Christmas, using the patients' accounts, over which she had control, because that what available in the store patients could buy from, while the patients would get some small treat occassionally. I remember that the worst transgressors had been transferred to the hospital I worked in after a big scandal relating to the abuse of patients in state hospitals for the insane (as we called them then.) So, abuse was winked at, stealing was expected, and, if you didn't go with the flow, you could expect to be assigned to the "wheel" where you'd work a different ward every shift, and be left alone in the "day hall" in the hope that some patient would go ballistic and cause you to lose your job. I could tell you worse stuff, but you get the picture. The bagel man is really pretty lucky.
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[banana] This is a superb article, Kimberly! Thanks a lot!