Saturday, September 22, 2012

The annual National Honesty Index was released.


Honest Tea set pop-up, standalone displays of their bottled tea on the street and left signage stating each tea was $1--but you paid solely through the honesty method. No cashier. Nobody watching except passersby. Just a box to put $1 in before you grabbed a tea. (Aww, a national marketing campaign pretending to have a conscience!)

They set up such displays in 30 American cities, and observed a variety of traits/behaviors/class markers about everyone who grabbed a tea. The results?

Only two cities were 100% honest, without a single theft. One city was Salt Lake City--where everyone fears the wrath of Brigham Young and Mitt Romney. The other was...Oakland (wha-wha-what??), which made folks in San Francisco feel horribly ashamed for five minutes before they realized they still lived in San Francisco and not Oakland, and immediately felt better.

The most common traits of honesty? Women, gray hair, beards. Which means everyone in Oakland is potentially a gray-haired bearded woman.

The least honest? People from Brooklyn and Los Angeles. And the most common traits of tea thieves? Bald, plaid wearers, and comic book readers. So, in other words, hipsters with a Superman jones.

The real upset was that people from Wall Street were the 7th most honest--which surprised everyone, not the least of which was everyone who works on Wall Street.


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