High trust, high productivity and behavior-based affiliative residential choices.

From Self-checkouts are disappearing from retailers. Here’s why by Pete Wilgoren.  

It’s the not-so-secret secret: retail chains are doing away with these lanes, and many do not want to talk about it.

In December, SFGATE.com reported that Target quietly removed self-checkouts in San Francisco, calling it “a trend in ‘defensive retailing’ that may soon spread across the city.”

Other reports say Target, when it does allow self-checkout, is only doing so for customers with ten items or less. No more big carts full of items.

Other chains, including Costco, have been dealing with the issue, saying that “shrink,” or the measure by which chains track retail theft, has increased in part due to the rollout of self-checkout.

Reading the article the implication is that self-check out is cheaper and more convenient for customers but that it facilitates theft.  

Stephen Green on Instapundit observes:

You can’t enjoy high-trust conveniences in low-trust societies.

In a free society where people have agency and accountability, there is a strong tendency for settlement patterns to emerge which might be described as homophilic segregation based on value compatibility.  Birds of a behavioral feather, flock together.

I have frequently commented that high-trust societies are almost always high productivity societies.  High trust communities are a delight to live and work.  But only where there is some minimum degree of consistency in terms of trust.  

An admixture of low trust actions and behaviors are highly detrimental to quality of life and to productivity.  This seems to be a case study demonstrating that there are tactics and processes (self-checkout) which can only work in high trust communities. If you want the efficiency and convenience, it can only occur with the compatible behaviors.

Two thoughts.

First - This feels like the sociological equivalent of Gresham's  Law.

In economics, Gresham's law is a monetary principle stating that "bad money drives out good". For example, if there are two forms of commodity money in circulation, which are accepted by law as having similar face value, the more valuable commodity will gradually disappear from circulation.

Bad money drives out good seems related to Low trust behaviors drive out high trust behaviors.

Second - This is not dissimilar to the Bush and Obama fiasco where it was assumed that if you subsidized people into home ownership they would adopt middle class behaviors and demonstrate middle class productivity.  Naively hopeful and well intentioned, it created an economic catastrophe.  

Middle class behaviors (thrift, work ethic, diligence, self-discipline, self-control, etc.) create the productivity which affords homeownership.  The home ownership does not create the behaviors.

You get self-checkout where there are high-trust behaviors.  Self-checkout does not otherwise make people more trustworthy.

It would be interesting to create a leading indicator of change based on the presence or disappearance of high-trust behaviors.  What are some of the other manifest and measurable high-trust tactics and processes which are associated with high productivity?  Self-checkout is one.  What are others?  

Sort of ties to the old joke, "This is why we can't have nice things . . . "

This line of thought suggests yet another.

We usually think of violence and property theft as conditions against which people react atavistically.  The crimes is sufficient unto itself to be rejected.  

But what if people react negatively to property crime for yet further reasons.  In other words, perhaps they witness low trust behaviors and not only consider a rise in crime but also consider a fall in productivity.  

Rising crime might be driving signals in terms of fear of loss of property and/or physical danger.  But it might also be simultaneously signaling longer term productivity decline as a separate issue.