Lived in rural Australia with this as commonplace. Fwiw the neighbour did have someone take the whole box one day. He did run after it and get a numberplate since he was close to the box at the time.

That's one thing about these, it's not that no one would ever steal them as if there's some magic in these areas that leads to zero theft. After all anyone can drive out there. They exist because there's little choice but to accept some losses since you can't staff a store selling small amounts of produce.

For all the comments along the lines of "society has gone to shit, look how nice it once was" just remember that theft still happens and these honesty boxes were always done out of raw necessity.

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freeopinion 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Hiring onsite security forces doesn't seem to be the answer. Inventory loss at big box stores is reportedly quite high. If you stocked a drop box with 20-dozen eggs and somebody stole a dozen, you might still be doing better than Walmart.

https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-california-stores-closed-...

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AnotherGoodName 6 days ago | parent [-]

That's exactly how it works. You accept the losses. Since the honesty box stores are very low volume and the box is emptied regularly you just accept that there will be losses but at least they'll be relatively small. The reason honesty boxes don't work in the city is that the equation leans to staffing being worthwhile to counter the losses.

I feel self-checkouts these days lean back towards the honesty box system but no one see's those as quaint at all :p

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ghaff 6 days ago | parent [-]

Self-checkout does have some checks in place in general but my sense is that most stores have ratcheted back on how carefully they check on things.

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AnotherGoodName 6 days ago | parent [-]

You could always scan the organic green beans as the cheaper non-organic variety if you wanted to but it's such minor theft (saves a few cents per dollar) that it's neither worth doing nor worth policing which is pretty similar to how honesty boxes work in reality.

	▲	ghaff 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		The obvious thing to me is that weight checks used to be annoyingly stringent--e.g. weigh your reusable bags. Aside from some employee keeping an eye on things I don't see anything like that around where I live any longer.

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partomniscient 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Also Australian and can confirm once you get on main-ish roads a certain distance from major population areas these were a thing (at least quite a few years ago, don't drive so haven't recent data on this stuff).

It's nice to think there is some trust/faith in humanity once you get a certain distance away from the frenetic pace of life in cities.

On a related note, have recently finished (with my wife) a bottle of Adnamurchan whisky - highly recommended, although I'm more of an Islay guy.

Also spent 2.5 years living in Scotland - those blue sky photos are the exception, not the norm.

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account42 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You are ignoring that theft still has to be rare for the boxes to make sense for the owner. Much rare than it would be if you put something like this in a big city.