DC Is Second-Most Honest City

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If you cut through the spin, how honest is DC, really? Apparently about 93%.

At least that’s what the folks at Honest Tea discovered when they put ice-cold bottles of organic tea, guarded only by a sign asking folks to pay $1, on a DC street on a hot summer day.

A hidden camera recorded the results, above.

Among the honest? A homeless man who proudly paid one dollar in change while expressing appreciation for the experiment and its belief in him.

So who was more honest than DC? Boston, at 93.3%. We beat out San Francisco, New York, Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles.

An area resident since 1997, Donna C. is a DC outsider. When she’s not running her writing and Web business, she’s running around the city, exploring the great outdoors, or trying to figure out how best to go green. See why she loves DC.

7 thoughts on “DC Is Second-Most Honest City

  1. “Theoretically, people see money on the counter, and no one around, they think they’re being watched.”

  2. Obviously they did not place the bottles of Honest Tea anywhere near Capitol Hill and the folks in Congress.

    I believe there would have been a very different result if the tea was placed in that location!

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  4. Wow, I didn’t see this in the local papers or the web.

    We are a caring city, people come here to make a difference, so I would expect us to do well.

    Good job Washingtonians!

  5. This is a different stand than the one inside Union Station–my colleagues and I walked over and got teas and paid our buck that day! Very cool social experiment.

  6. The experiment would have been far more telling and interesting if they had used an uncovered receptacle for collecting the cash, rather than a sealed receptacle.