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.