Honesty experiment in China ends with losses of 20 percent for participating convenience stores

Two stores in China trialled unstaffed shops this week, in an experiment to see whether customers would pay up without being prompted.

Convenience stores in Beijing and Hangzhou were temporarily replaced with automated payment systems and advertised as “completely unstaffed”. Sadly, the experiment was not an unqualified success. While most customers proved to be honest, some chose to pay only a fraction of their bill, and in some case nothing at all.

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