flourishing

Honesty boxes: traditionally found on rural lay-bys, offering local produce like eggs and apples in exchange for a small donation.

With cash use falling, they might be expected to disappear – a roadside relic as we all pull onto the technology superhighway.

But, in fact, many are flourishing.

Cash payments are being replaced with online transfers via QR codes, and small traders are using honesty boxes as part of their marketing on social media.

That online marketing has a payoff. Some are finding that instead of just attracting passing trade, customers are making a special journey to buy from them.

On the side of an A-road between Canterbury and the north Kent coast is a small but colourful honesty box.

Packed inside the Blean Bakery Box are cookies for £3.50 in an assortment of unusual flavours, and tubs of dunkable cookies with dips from candyfloss to brownie – all baked by Annabelle Cox.

The 36-year-old founded Dunk Cookies just before the pandemic. She installed the honesty box earlier this year and it has brought in enough money to pay the rent at her bakery on a nearby industrial estate.

“The honesty box means we can be part of my community – bringing something to them, rather than the business being solely online,” says the affable Annabelle.

Various food festivals gave her a following and some local custom. Now, she opens the honesty box every day at 9am until locking it back up at 8pm. Despite plans to scale back the bakery next year, to spend more time with her young son, the honesty box will remain.

It is on a school run route, can empty within hours, and is regularly refilled.

Annabelle films the re-stock and posts it on Instagram. The coverage has brought in customers from further afield. Annabelle also posts pictures of her adding up the takings, to test the honesty or dishonesty of customers.

Almost without exception, they pay. One customer who arrived during the BBC’s visit filled a bag, scanned the QR code, and promised to transfer the money once she had a signal. There was no doubt she would.

Annabelle says 90% of customers pay online after scanning the QR code inside the box. Many other honesty boxes around the UK use the same technology, some even leaving a calculator inside for customers to tot up the cost of what they take.

Anyone who is confused can press the video doorbell, for a hotline to Annabelle’s bakery a few miles away.

That also helps with security, as does the fact the box is placed outside the window of the local pub – The Hare at Blean.

Matthew Hayden, the chef-owner of the pub, says he is happy to support another local business, and lends the space for the box free of charge. Occasionally, it brings in custom for him too.

Having spent time in Byron Bay in Australia, where he saw honesty boxes at the end of people’s driveways, he says he liked the idea of seeing something similar at home.

At the box outside the window, and inside at the bar, customers are mostly, and increasingly, using their smartphones to pay.

Both take cash – the honesty box has envelopes and a letterbox for change. But Matthew says payment for food and drinks in the pub is now “almost entirely” by phone.

Half of UK adults now pay for things by tapping their phone, according to the latest data from banking trade body, UK Finance.

Graham Mott, director of strategy at Link – which oversees cash access and the UK’s ATM network – says that has been a rapid change, meaning many shoppers now only go out with a phone and carry coins less.

Casual payments, such as charity donations, honesty boxes, crafts stalls and rewarding buskers, are increasingly made digitally.

“There are positives, as traders don’t have to rely on customers having available change. They may also have the opportunity to upsell items at higher prices,” he says.

But some charities are worried that the disappearance of cash will shut some people out of all types of retail.

Affordable food club charity The Bread-and-Butter Thing says many of its younger members use notes and coins, alongside banking apps, to make their limited budgets stretch further.

As well as phones as a method of paying, people are discovering honesty boxes by scrolling through social media. Some small businesses, like Annabelle’s have spotted the opportunity.

Bakeries, in particular, seem to have taken to the idea of advertising via honesty boxes – the contents of which are filmed, pictured and posted online. A quick search on social media quickly highlights bright young bakers with bright boxes.

But the range of produce in honesty boxes goes far beyond cookies and cakes. Oysters and dog treats are among the more unusual contents for sale at these stalls.

In Scotland, where honesty boxes are commonly found, a golf course allowed people to pay for their round by dropping money into a collection box.

Even so, the traditional honesty box lives on in many areas. Many farms and smallholdings sell eggs, seasonal vegetables and fruit for cash in collection boxes.

For the most part, this is still the image conjured up when people talk of honesty boxes they have used.

These images were literally the source of a collection by photographer Kathryn Martin, who spent a couple of years charting these quirky stalls during travels around Suffolk, Essex, Somerset and Sussex.

In her notes, she says she loves an honesty box “not just for the delight of the home grown and the childish excitement and memories of playing shop but the discovery of the simple, unpretentious, local and handmade in a world saturated with high tech, fake news and globalisation”.

She also enjoys seeing the stalls themselves, and the ice cream tubs inside them to collect customers’ cash.

But she says QR codes change the dynamics of an honesty box, and the sense of trust.

Perhaps, as with other technology, it brings a loss of innocence.

“On the whole, most people are honest,” she writes about the traditional honesty box.

“Maybe it’s the uncertainty of being watched from behind that twitching curtain or perhaps it’s the nostalgic feel-good factor from playing shop, or the untainted natural beauty of their rural locations that remind us that honesty is indeed the best policy.”

Additional reporting by Connie Bowker