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My honesty index for where I live: the Wawa app order pick up rack. I go to my local Wawa locations an inordinate amount, and very frequently I order a latte, matcha, or some other fancy drink. If you order on the app, at almost every location I've been to and every location I go to regularly, they just put your order on a big rack of takeout orders identified only by the three digit number on the receipt taped to it. Customers come in, take their order, and walk out. Most frequently, if I've ordered on the app, I don't speak to anyone in the store unless it's to say thank you to someone for holding the door; I walk in, take my coffee off the rack, walk out.
They put absolutely zero effort into making sure that you take your order, or even that you have an order at all. Naively, assuming perfect honesty on the part of all customers, I would guess an error rate around 1-2% of people taking the wrong order, just because they misread the receipt. My experience across hundreds of wawa app orders is actually below that, I can't think of a single time my order has been missing (though I can think of several times it's been wrong). Nor, in all the time I've spent in Wawas, do I ever recall witnessing someone complain that their order was missing.
Every day, thousands of times a day, each Wawa location takes $5-25 worth of food and drink, puts it out for anyone to take, and by and large only the people who paid for it take it. That's, when you really think about it, a ridiculous record of honest and law-abiding citizenry. Nor is it purely the small town local yokels I live amongst, my Wawa is only two minutes from a major interstate, nothing stops anyone driving by from pulling in, grabbing a coffee, and being halfway to Jersey before anyone even notices.
My Wawa index for honesty is my theoretical bellwether for when I'll get concerned about society. It indicates that either our society is so honest that no one steals, or that our society is so rich that it is cheaper to simply let a few lattes get stolen every day than it is to take any effort to prevent them from being stolen.
Turning this into my Wawa appreciation post: if you live in Eastern PA, a remarkable thing about Wawas is that the customer base cuts across classes completely. Work trucks and vans and beat up Hyundais share the parking lot with brand new Porsche and Tesla electrics. It's universal.
Counter point: it’s trivial to identify and either ostracize or legally hobble a repeat offender, and there’s barely any gratification from a one-time theft of an overpriced dessert coffee.
On the other hand, I have personally witnessed people attempting to steal booze and smokes, both of which are expensive as hell and taxed to high heaven.
Food doesn’t seem to be a terribly powerful motivator for would-be thieves. Food is plentiful and literally no one in America starves unless it’s on purpose.
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Riddle me this, Batman - doesn't "Wawa" sound suspiciously close to "Yaweh" ??? Think. About. It. All roads lead to the One True Hoagie Lord, and the rich and poor shall know him alike.
But seriously -
I like your Wawa honesty index quite a bit. To add some specificity, I think it's a good index for a very direct person-to-person level of honesty. Let me explain. If I'm a no-good-nik walking into a wawa to swipe an order from the ToGo rack that isn't mine, that's quite literally stealing someone else's - one, single person's - lunch or breakfast. It strikes at a deeply personal wrong that's been obvious since childhood. The trope for bullying is literally "stealing someone's lunch money." So, as far as directly personal honesty index goes, I think you've nailed it.
I think, however, it breaks down when you add some ambiguity and turn it from person-to-person to person-in-society. The great, recent example I have for this is from the San Francisco Streets mini-doc by Channel 5 News with Andrew Callaghan (successor to YouTube gonzo journalism channel "All Gas No Breaks"). He interviews a semi-organized stolen goods crew who enjoy haughtily recounting their felonious exploits. They run into high end retailers in the downtown shopping district of San Francisco, Union Square, and quickly snatch as much merchandise as possible. This is done with little to no stealth or concealment. The primary issue at hand is San Francisco's laws related to theft and larceny, but that's for another thread.
A key, but quick, line from one of these non-cat-burglars is "for most of these corporations, it's a write off anyway." Leave aside how valid that is on a legal level and leave aside the downstream impacts of increased insurance costs. That's beside the point. What counts is the revelation of the person-in-society mindset. "I'm not hurting a person, I'm causing a few corporate numbers on a spreadsheet to shift from one column to another...I'm not stealing FiveHourMarathon's sandwich, I'm effecting the same outcome as lost inventory in transit...this isn't a personal crime because I don't conceive of people being harmed or even involved in a direct and meaningful way." When you turn society into an abstract concept, you can abstract away very real and damaging actions. Let's not even get started on "selling some drugs just to pay rent."
(Back to the Hoagies...in a second.)
If everyone could rely on the mental model of person-to-person concepts of honesty, society would be safer, higher trust, All-Of-The-Good-Things. In fact, I'd argue that the primary "low brow" teaching of all of the Abrahamic religions pretty much amounts to "think of all of your actions as essentially person-to-person (or, really, person-to-God) and behave accordingly." Stealing isn't just wrong because a Holy Text says so and because you may be punished for it, it's wrong because it "hurts" God/Society/A stand in concept for another person even if it isn't an actual physical presence.
I don't think a totally secular society has a good replacement for this concept. The "best" I have seen is weak sloganeering - "don't be evil ... don't be a dick .... not cool!" It's underdeveloped and light on content and metaphysical heft. It's not specific enough to guide behavior and is used more as an after the fact admonishment. You do have over-thinking and secular-moralizing intellectual arguments about the moral fabric of society and social contracts but, again, I don't see their utility as behavioral guides. By the time I've digested Sam Harris' long winded treatment on the compound ethical implications of impersonal petty theft, I will have already digested FiveHourMarathon's Thanksgiving Hoagie with extra cranberry sauce.
Told you we would wind back up at Hoagies!
I'm not familiar with the logistics at Wawas, but it may be worth considering the chances that you run into the person who's hoagie you are trying to steal -- and while store security is unlikely to beat you up for stealing a sandwich, the same cannot be said for some hungry trucker?
I think that only happens if the sandwich thief offers resistance. What's far more likely is Hungry Trucker sees the steal and goes, "Hey, that's my sandwich" and the thief responds, "oh, whoops, my mistake" and then just sort of wanders out of the store. Sure, it's probably pretty obvious he was trying to snatch the sandwich, but it's no harm no foul.
If life has deposited you into a situation where you're stealing Wawa Hoagies, you're in survival mode and affable duplicity is your middle name.
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Love it. The hoagie theory of morality fully fleshed out.
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The same is true at the McDonald’s on Oxford Street in London, probably one of the busiest locations and a zero-trust environment with few to no locals and full of random passers-by and tourists. You can just walk up, take order number #3502 and unless the person who ordered it stops you, you’re fine.
I think the reality is that these takeout settings have only modest stealing rates for several reasons.
For example most modern beggars and petty thieves are in it for drugs and/or booze / money in general rather than actual food, which food banks, shelters etc have plenty of; when thieves steal, say, costlier groceries, it’s typically to sell. And secondly those who are obviously extremely, dysfunctionally mentally ill and/or living on the street can be easily identified by staff anyway, they’re not going to stealth steal like this without anyone noticing.
Or possibly, our perception of "zero trust" is a very weird zero point, a very weird social construct, where the vast majority of individuals are in fact law abiding citizens who will basically follow the rules in all situations, despite the perception of low social trust and a total lack of effort towards enforcement.
This is exactly my point, we first worlders walk through life acting like the sky is falling because something-something social fabric is fraying, but if we look around at mundane stuff we ignore every single day, we see evidence of people acting for the common good.
I'm not particularly saying that my Wawa is special, or that Wawa is special, I'm saying that when we feel the need to not just leave food out for anyone to take at any time, that will be a significant indication of something bad.
People in Japan and Korea often leave the most expensive item on their person, such as a phone, laptop or DSLR, unattended to hold a place for them while they're off using the loo.
If you think you're in a high-trust society, you've seen nothing yet.
Well, I leave my laptop out to keep my space when I go to the bathroom too and I'm in the US. Not NYC, god forbid, but still....
But speaking of Japan, I was once waiting for a very chic department store to open at like 9 am with a handful of other tourists in Tokyo when I saw a (very small female) store employee standing outside, shuffling something around right outside the door. I looked over and she must have had thousands and thousands of dollars in yen in an envelope. I have no idea what she was doing or how often she does this, but I was shocked to see it and she barely winced seeing me (a foreign man) looking at her wad of cash. High trust society indeed.
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