We have these too in Switzerland, ranging from simple like in the article to full farm stores like this:
https://www.leimbihof.ch/bio-laden
Last time I was there they had a milk cow full fillet/tenderloin (among many other things) for around $280 (converted from chf). The store is completely unmanned and you pay electronically. If there are cameras they're not obvious.
tinix · 2h ago
This definitely isn't just a Scotland thing... I grew up in Alabama and this was common there, and honestly I've seen this all over rural America. It's very common for farm stands during the harvesting season.
Still, cool website, I enjoyed a few articles there even if this one was very short.
technothrasher · 1h ago
When I was a preteen kid many years ago in Massachusetts enjoying the rural summer life, we used to go around to the local farms and beg produce off the farmers. We'd then set up a card table and a cash box at the side of the road somewhere and then go off to play for the day. While we were gone, the kindly wives of the farmers we'd gotten the produce from would come and buy back the produce from us for whatever minimal price we'd set on it. So as the afternoon wore on, we'd head back and excitedly collect our change and then head to the local general store to buy penny candy.
We didn't know at the time that it was the wives buying the produced back. We just thought we were amazingly successful shop keepers.
vondur · 1h ago
Yes, I've seen this in rural America. Purchased some firewood at a random stand on the highway. Pick some up, leave $5 in the box. Really nice to see this sort of thing in action.
jonah · 1h ago
Yup, there are quite a few little self-serve farm stands around here in Northern California.
And some firewood places like the ones the sibling commenter mentioned as well.
Telemakhos · 1h ago
I've seen this in rural North Carolina. Eggs were available on-your-honor in the countryside back when the cities were out of eggs.
pipes · 1h ago
I know a guy who is from Brazil, he was utterly shocked that honesty boxes existed. I doubt they are universal. And they probably require a high trust society.
gus_massa · 53m ago
Hi from Argentina! Is that close enough?
If you put one of these here in Buenos Aires, I expect it to dissapear in an hour.
But a long time ago I went with my wife for a few weeks to a small town in the mountais in the Cordoba(AR) province. We left the bikes unchained an unatended for hours. I exect a honesty box to be possible there. Except during weekends, when it get's full of turists.
beardyw · 1h ago
I was in Cyprus many many years ago. Driving along we saw a sign for a bar and stopped. Under a canopy of vines were tables and chairs, a fridge full of beer, a price list, and a plastic tub with some money in it.
A delightful moment among many.
jjgreen · 1h ago
A friend and I took a trip from Sheffield to Glasgow just before an election, and on a grim and dark winter evening we went out into the barely-lit backstreets looking for a particular pub. A group of 6 or so well-built young men approached us, ..."Hey lads, are you proud to be Scottish?", "Er, I suppose we would be if we were Scottish, but we're from Yorkshire ...". This being not long after "Trainspotting" was released, I was half-expecting a knife to be pulled, but no "Oh sorry lads, we're just canvasing for the Scottish independence, ... you having a good night? ..."
Nice place.
jMyles · 1h ago
...and one of the best music cities in the world at the moment.
AnotherGoodName · 1h ago
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.
freeopinion · 59m ago
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.
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
ghaff · 47m ago
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.
AnotherGoodName · 37m ago
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 · 24m ago
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.
account42 · 55m ago
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.
Levitz · 1h ago
I found several things like these last year while doing a pilgrimage through Camino de Santiago[1] in northern Spain. The idea that people, after days or even weeks of walking stayed, at the very least, honest enough to keep it happening, moved me to a large degree.
Very common in New England to have honesty system for various farm goods especially in exurban/rural locations. Often there are, stands that usually high school kids are looking after, but having just something with a payment box by the side of the road is pretty common. In fact, near where my brother has a house in Maine, there's a cheesecake store that doesn't routinely have someone there.
pumplekin · 49m ago
I live in Scotland, have two former racing greyhounds, and I'm very grateful for a local farmer who has a dog run / playpark with an honesty box we can drop something in to help with upkeep when we give our two a nice run.
alistairSH · 1h ago
I've seen this outside DC, in Loudoun County, for eggs and other easily packaged farm goods. Lots of smaller (and large) farms in the area.
I also have a friend who keeps chickens in Seattle (inside the city). He tried an honesty box for excess eggs, but they just got stolen.
croisillon · 1h ago
Austria here: some villages have this, and some have the dystopian unattended vending machines stores
kypro · 1h ago
We have chickens and I'd love to do an honesty box. Problem is we live in an English city and it's extremely low-trust like most English cities these days.
It's not even that I worry someone would steal the eggs that concerns me most, it's that a lot of people would probably think it's funny to throw them at cars or house/shop windows.
I'd love to live some where where this is possible... I heard that Lee Kuan Yew on visiting England in the 50s saw an honesty box and was inspired by how civilised the English were.
Not sure what's happened to us since then... You definitely couldn't do that now. We're like a completely different people. Although it's nice to see that this practise does still live on in some rural communities.
Also – the honesty "box" in that lead picture is absolutely beautiful...
PJDK · 1h ago
Can I push you to give it a try - places with honesty boxes feel like places with honesty boxes if that makes sense.
Obviously you might get your car egged once - but you can get eggs anywhere.
If it's any help, my (admittedly very nice) corner of Bristol has a couple of honesty boxes for eggs and things about the place and I've never seen any trouble from it.
specproc · 1h ago
Not quite honesty boxes, but Bristol has a good culture of "tat".
It used to be quite common to see usable household goods left outside a house for others to take.
Ichthypresbyter · 49m ago
As opposed to the story about the person who leaves their unwanted furniture outside with a sign reading "Free- Please Take". It sits there undisturbed for a week.
Then they replace the sign with one that reads "$10- put cash in letterbox"
Within an hour, the furniture is gone, though of course there's no cash!
ghaff · 41m ago
I guess it's very location-dependent. I live a ways off a pretty busy exurban road in MA and if I leave somewhat useable stuff at the end of my driveway with a free sign it will probably be gone withing a few hours.
ralferoo · 1h ago
> Problem is we live in an English city and it's extremely low-trust like most English cities these days.
If you go hiking in the countryside, you encounter honesty boxes in small villages fairly often. I guess the fact that every knows everyone else tends to make smaller communities more trusting and trustworthy.
wonderwonder · 1h ago
They have these in the rural parts of Kansas and Missouri.
My mom has a country vet that she gets medication for her animals from and the vet just has a box in front of his farm where he puts the medication for his various patients after doing a phone consult. Patients take the medication and leave cash.
I was stunned when I saw it the first time and realized that there really is another way to live.
mrbluecoat · 2h ago
Oh look, a beautiful, unspoiled place on earth full of kind, honest people and innocent, happy animals! Cue the overtourism in 3, 2, 1...
showerst · 2h ago
Scotland is not some undiscovered place that nobody ever talks about visiting.
graemep · 1h ago
Depends where you are. it is known in the US, and its popular with people from the rest of the UK.
It does not seem to be much known in Asia, apart from as the source of whiskey.
I do not about the rest of Europe, but my feeling is that it is not well known.
I have been quite surprised how many people (from Asia and Europe) can visit, or even live in, the UK and not go out of London.
While Scotland is not unknown, there are certainly a lot of people who might visit who have a low awareness of what is there, and articles like this show some very attractive aspects of Scotland.
ghaff · 15m ago
I suspect that outside of maybe one main destination city (Edinburgh--maybe to with Glasgow), Scotland probably feels somewhat hard to get around to someone from a very different culture and they may not be wrong.
jacquesm · 1h ago
Keep it that way. The last thing you want is the locust plague turning your beautiful countryside into a theme park where the locals can no longer live.
gbuk2013 · 1h ago
Oh don’t worry - the midges are doing a great job of keeping it that way! :)
Let's not turn every thread into an anti-Trump thread. On second thought, Let's.
pjc50 · 47m ago
This is already something of a problem in places due to AirBnB, especially on the islands.
Mind you, I live in Edinburgh and the Festival has arrived, so I have an extra 100k people to walk past or through everytime I want to get anywhere this month.
rkachowski · 1h ago
it's all good, we already have plagues of midges to protect the countryside from humanity.
DonHopkins · 1h ago
Or going on Glaswegian Chocolate Bar Safaris hoping to spot Sad Oompa Loompas in their natural habitat.
If not a theme park or safari, then at least a movie:
>A petition to to bring back the experience has been launched, while Scottish actress Karen Gillan has said she wants to star in a film adaptation of the event.
Weirdly Scotland is more popular with European tourists than you might think. Until recently I lived in a relatively tourist heavy part of the country, near Loch Lomond, and every summer we'd get a lot of cars from European countries on the roads.
_Wintermute · 1h ago
The coachloads of Chinese tourists that I see every summer make me doubt this.
Last time I was there they had a milk cow full fillet/tenderloin (among many other things) for around $280 (converted from chf). The store is completely unmanned and you pay electronically. If there are cameras they're not obvious.
Still, cool website, I enjoyed a few articles there even if this one was very short.
We didn't know at the time that it was the wives buying the produced back. We just thought we were amazingly successful shop keepers.
And some firewood places like the ones the sibling commenter mentioned as well.
If you put one of these here in Buenos Aires, I expect it to dissapear in an hour.
But a long time ago I went with my wife for a few weeks to a small town in the mountais in the Cordoba(AR) province. We left the bikes unchained an unatended for hours. I exect a honesty box to be possible there. Except during weekends, when it get's full of turists.
A delightful moment among many.
Nice place.
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.
https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-california-stores-closed-...
I feel self-checkouts these days lean back towards the honesty box system but no one see's those as quaint at all :p
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camino_de_Santiago
I also have a friend who keeps chickens in Seattle (inside the city). He tried an honesty box for excess eggs, but they just got stolen.
It's not even that I worry someone would steal the eggs that concerns me most, it's that a lot of people would probably think it's funny to throw them at cars or house/shop windows.
I'd love to live some where where this is possible... I heard that Lee Kuan Yew on visiting England in the 50s saw an honesty box and was inspired by how civilised the English were.
Not sure what's happened to us since then... You definitely couldn't do that now. We're like a completely different people. Although it's nice to see that this practise does still live on in some rural communities.
Also – the honesty "box" in that lead picture is absolutely beautiful...
Obviously you might get your car egged once - but you can get eggs anywhere.
If it's any help, my (admittedly very nice) corner of Bristol has a couple of honesty boxes for eggs and things about the place and I've never seen any trouble from it.
It used to be quite common to see usable household goods left outside a house for others to take.
Then they replace the sign with one that reads "$10- put cash in letterbox"
Within an hour, the furniture is gone, though of course there's no cash!
If you go hiking in the countryside, you encounter honesty boxes in small villages fairly often. I guess the fact that every knows everyone else tends to make smaller communities more trusting and trustworthy.
It does not seem to be much known in Asia, apart from as the source of whiskey.
I do not about the rest of Europe, but my feeling is that it is not well known.
I have been quite surprised how many people (from Asia and Europe) can visit, or even live in, the UK and not go out of London.
While Scotland is not unknown, there are certainly a lot of people who might visit who have a low awareness of what is there, and articles like this show some very attractive aspects of Scotland.
Mind you, I live in Edinburgh and the Festival has arrived, so I have an extra 100k people to walk past or through everytime I want to get anywhere this month.
https://x.com/KalhanR/status/1762703755462468045
We went viral as Oompa Loompas but we're just normal people:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv2y59r89vjo
If not a theme park or safari, then at least a movie:
>A petition to to bring back the experience has been launched, while Scottish actress Karen Gillan has said she wants to star in a film adaptation of the event.
https://www.tiktok.com/@movieweb/video/7348892246982397190
>I would be a cheeky Oompa Looma!