Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

While running through the content in my feed reader the other day I came across an interesting piece by the folks at Web Worker Daily. The piece was entitled Welcome to the No Cost Cafe. That warranted a read for sure. As I started reading I was blown away. Turns out that a Google programmer named Ervin Peretz has opened up a cafe in Kirkland Washington called the Terra Bite Cafe where you can pay what you can for everything. There are not even prices listed on the menu.

The idea is based on Peretz’ thought that all people are generally good but that they are influenced by their environment. Basically, if people see good they will do good as well. This is an incredible social experiment and I think it just might work.

After reading this I immediately thought of the story in the Tipping Point (I am pretty sure it was the Tipping Point but it may have been Blink) where the NYC public officials thought that if they continually kept the subway clean and free of grafitti the crime problems would go away. This thought stemmed from roughly the same one that spawned the Terra Bite Cafe – if people see good they will do good.

In the case of the NYC subway the idea worked with flying colors. Surprisingly the crime dropped dramatically from simply keeping the subway clean. People saw good and began to do good since they knew, simply by the cleanliness of the subway, that bad behavior was not acceptable.

I think the Terra Bite may work and even thrive. The implications on business in general could be pretty big. That said, I am sure everyone won’t flip to the system in a long time if they ever do but it could allow us to understand the human mind a bit more and run our businesses accordingly.

That said, I will leave you with this: Most of the world’s people still rely on barter systems where none of the listed prices are firm (I experienced that first hand in Cairo). Is the idea of the Terra Bite really any different than that? If not, it should work just fine once all of us start to shed the retail ideals that fill our minds.