Open register at the store
October 8, 2016 11:18 AM   Subscribe

This self service store in Jersey really trusts you.
posted by Foci for Analysis (29 comments total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
The clerk was actually just behind the counter with his girlfriend, painting her nails and complaining about how he wasn't even supposed to be there today.
posted by entropicamericana at 11:36 AM on October 8, 2016 [20 favorites]


Makes sense. Some of my rural-based grandparents never locked their cars (even in the city) and left their keys in the visor "in case someone needed to borrow it."
posted by tilde at 11:41 AM on October 8, 2016 [2 favorites]


The dairy farm near my parents' house has an honor system. Take your own jug, fill it with fresh (raw) milk, put money in the box. Only on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
posted by tippy at 12:09 PM on October 8, 2016


Ditto with the Lewis Oliver Dairy in Northport, NY. It is a small farm smack dab in the middle of the town and features an honor system for animal feed bags.
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:35 PM on October 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


In Scandinavia you can often find produce in untended stalls roadside in rural areas.
posted by Harald74 at 12:53 PM on October 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


RiverBooks in Hallowell Maine worked pretty much entirely on the honor system for about 25 years.
posted by kaibutsu at 12:58 PM on October 8, 2016


I bet the theft and shrinkage is about the same as at any other retail outlet. Stealers gonna steal. Most people are honest.
posted by chavenet at 1:43 PM on October 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yeah, here in farmland in Scandinavia almost everything was honor system until about five years ago. There are still a large plurality of stalls and shops with no-one attending, but now the cash-boxes are locked and you can't get change. It was a bit of a bother to begin with, but since now you can use your phone to pay, it's OK.
posted by mumimor at 2:03 PM on October 8, 2016


IS this really that surprising? I feel like honor boxes are pretty common in rural areas. I used to buy veggies from an honor box in CT, scallops from a deepfreeze honor box in a different part of CT, tomatoes and corn from honor boxes in NJ, and pick-your-own berries from an honor box in NH. I find it half sad, half amusing that it would be video-worthy.

The place looks vaguely familiar, but probably because it looks like three dozen similar places in southern NJ that sell produce, preserves, and pie.
posted by Miko at 2:28 PM on October 8, 2016 [3 favorites]


> IS this really that surprising? I feel like honor boxes are pretty common in rural areas

I live in the suburbs and have paid for eggs here using an unattended cash box.
posted by The corpse in the library at 2:35 PM on October 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


I bet the theft and shrinkage is about the same as at any other retail outlet.

I'm not sure if you fully appreciate the implications of what you're saying, because if sales and theft are about the same with or without an employee, one of the things that means is that the employee is an unnecessary expense.
posted by mhoye at 2:36 PM on October 8, 2016


mhoye, that's only true if, as a business owner, the only things you care about are sales and theft.
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 2:41 PM on October 8, 2016 [3 favorites]


There are a lot of these sort of produce roadside shops in East Anglia (UK)
posted by Burn_IT at 3:10 PM on October 8, 2016


I would trust people to leave the money, but I wouldn't trust people to add up their costs and calculate the tax. Produce typically has no tax, but in a more general-goods store like that, where some things will have tax and some won't, how do they deal with this?
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 4:00 PM on October 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


They can set a price at which tax is included. A lot of places do that in order to come out with even dollar amounts.
posted by Miko at 4:10 PM on October 8, 2016


Oh, I just remembered my library has one for donated books they aren't going to add to circulation. Useful when I've loaned out Pillars Of The Earth and need another for a buck (they NEVER come back).
posted by tilde at 4:24 PM on October 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


But if they don't know how many of what they sold, how do they know how much tax to pay? Do they have to do a full inventory every week or something and every time they get new goods delivered?
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 4:24 PM on October 8, 2016


Sorry, I mean how much does THE STORE know how much tax to pay, if that was unclear. If they find $50 in the box at the end of the day, how do they know if they sold $42 of taxable stuff and $8 non-taxable vs. $34 taxable and $16 non-taxable etc. etc. Without knowing that, they can't know how much to hand over.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 4:27 PM on October 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


And if they do have shrinkage, then even daily inventory wouldn't help...you have $56 of stuff missing and $50 in the box, you don't know which $6 worth of missing stuff was stolen (and thus which $50 paid for, so even if you know the missing stuff is $48 taxable and $8 non-taxable, you presumably only have to pay tax on the stuff actually sold, but you don't know whether the stolen came from the taxable or non-taxable pile).
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 4:29 PM on October 8, 2016


All they need to know is the total of taxable sales and the total of exempt sales, calculated quarterly. So it's not that hard. You do it off total inventory.
posted by Miko at 4:39 PM on October 8, 2016


But if you have shrinkage then inventory won't work. You won't know if it was taxable or non-taxable stuff that was stolen (and thus won't know how much of what was paid for was taxable).
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 4:44 PM on October 8, 2016


Think of buying stuff at the farmer's market. It usually works exactly the same way - they usually don't create unique receipts for each product, or keep a running inventory of tax/nontax sales, so the only way they know at the end of the day what to record is that they brought 100 lbs of tomatoes, and now they have 41; they brought 20 bunches of flowers, and now they have 3; etc.

But if you have shrinkage then inventory won't work.

Sure, but you can just absorb the loss. I doubt it is a huge problem (if it were they'd start staffing the store), and even if there is theft it's hard to really steal enough that it would be the tax that's the concern; what would be, a $6 jar of jam, $12 pies? So you could just pay the tax on the inventory for small losses - that's just cents, and you could cover it on your margin - and if you have a large theft, well, you call the police and I assume you could report it as a business loss.
posted by Miko at 4:47 PM on October 8, 2016


So they pay tax as though everything had been sold? Farmers markets/produce stands are different because basic food items aren't taxable most places.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 4:56 PM on October 8, 2016


Something tells me this person is not nearly as concerned about how much tax he owes as a number of mefites. He is not overly worried about the honesty of others so I assume he just pays what he perceives to be a tax that is fair/honest based on his overall experience with his business sales.
posted by notreally at 6:16 PM on October 8, 2016 [4 favorites]


We get our eggs and milk from a dairy a few miles down the road that has an unattended cashbox. A couple of weeks ago I asked the farmer if the totals ever don't add up. She said "I don't know."
posted by sy at 6:42 PM on October 8, 2016 [4 favorites]


Farmers markets/produce stands are different because basic food items aren't taxable most places.

Different? Yes and no. Farmers markets do sell a lot of things that are taxable: prepared food, beeswax candles, potpourri, juice drinks, sachets, aprons, seeds, seedlings, flowers, etc. Only things like basic raw produce, baked goods and meats are exempt from sales tax as "food." Most farmer's markets have a mix of taxable and nontaxable offerings.

How the categories work totally depends upon the state, but for instance, in the state I am most familiar with, produce is nontaxable as are preserves/pickles/etc., but "prepared food," as in chicken salad, bean dips, tacos, soups, or whatever, is taxable using a meals tax because the law calls these things a meal. Goods like herbal sachets, beeswax candles, mulling spices, etc. are farm products but are taxable at the regular nonfood item rate.

So they pay tax as though everything had been sold?

No....they pay tax on what is actually gone from inventory. They just do the subtraction. Know what you started with, subtract what is missing. Add up the dollar value of everything missing in the category, calculate the total tax on the aggregate amount, pay the total tax quarterly. Tax isn't not due daily, so daily/weekly sales don't matter - even monthly may not matter unless you arrange your books by month - you just pay quarterly for whatever total inventory you sold from each category (tax, special tax, nontax). All they need to know is the aggregate.

This place in the video is basically a farmstand. It's like a booth at a farmer's market. It has a mix of nontaxable produce and taxable goods that are either subject to prepared food/meals tax or sales tax. I am sure you're thinking about those trowels and things on those wan display racks but I bet they hardly ever sell, and again, if you are taking enough in overall and have appropriately priced your stuff, you can declare and meet your tax assessment based solely on inventory without worrying about tracking individual sales. What most small farm retail operations do is compile a quarterly summary of tax and nontax sales and just write a check covering sales tax for taxable items. It's one entry, against the summary entry for income. If you fear an audit, yes, you want a written receipt for each sale; but small farmstands are rarely audited.

I feel like even having an expectation that it has to be done another way is something that's only come to us with the advent, within the last 30 years, of point-of-sale computer systems that track and compile each transaction daily, by themselves,without any further bookkeeping, and can spit it all out as a report at the end of each day. In my experience working in various businesses as a younger person, the management of small business sales tax payments was quarterly and it was always done based on aggregates, not on tallying individual sales.
posted by Miko at 7:47 PM on October 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


My grandmother practiced a fairly intense version of the honor system selling eggs, where she would leave the eggs in a refrigerator in the rear entryway with a tin can for coins (these were 50 cents a dozen, more a service to the townspeople than a business I guess), and then she would just leave the house unlocked at all times in case someone needed eggs. It was a pretty common occurrence back then to be at her place visiting, hear the back door open and someone yell thanks and her respond by name. She never once had anything stolen or any other issues.

On the tax thing, I really do assume that a whole lot of the honor system stands simply don't report that income, or at least don't actually track it the way a traditional business would. Those are almost certainly a tiny side income and never a primary income source for the operators. Seems way more akin to selling a neighbor a bushel of apples on the side than a store that sells apples full time.
posted by neonrev at 8:53 PM on October 8, 2016 [3 favorites]


There was (is?) a produce farm store on US Rt 322 East of State College PA that did the honor system thing. Even 20 years ago it was really out of the ordinary.
posted by james33 at 3:56 AM on October 9, 2016


About 15 years ago in Dawlish, Devon, I popped into a shop: Gay's Creamery, on Saturday morning at the height of tourist season to find the shop empty and the till open. Locals who gradually filtered in over the course of a few minutes seemed to think it wasn't unusual and was nothing to worry about. And that a person could leave their till open in Dawlish when they felt like it.

It was such a funny old-fashioned shop and such a funny old-fashioned owner when he got back - he would have been in his 60's - I was surprised to find it online just now, still family owned but probably has more staff now (SLYT). It was famous then for clotted cream and ice cream and pies, which still seems to be the case.

Black swan explanation, Gay's Creamery being just over on the left of the Brook.
posted by glasseyes at 11:21 AM on October 9, 2016


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