Jon Murphy’s post this morning reminded me of a job I had when I was 12 or 13 in which I helped internalize what otherwise would have been an externality. I posted about it briefly here, but I’ll say more.
The house I lived in in Carman, Manitoba was on a busy highway about 1/4 mile from Syl’s Drive Inn. Don’t ask me why it it’s called “Inn” instead of “In.” I remember it as having one n in the 1960s, but my my memory may be imperfect. The Drive Inn, which opened in April each year and closed in October, was owned by Quentin Sylvester. It served chips (our word for French fries), hamburgers, hot dogs, milkshakes, soft ice cream cones, and pop (our word for sodas.)
There was one nasty problem: some customers, after eating in their cars, would throw their garbage on the road. Either Quentin Sylvester was a very observant man or he got complaints from residents nearby. Either way, he came up with a solution: hire someone to clean the streets of garbage for about 3 blocks towards downtown from the drive-in. He came to me and offered me 50 cents per day to come to his drive in early in the morning (about 6:30 a.m.), clean the area on his property and burn the trash, and then scour the street (highway) for garbage over those 3 blocks. I accepted. (Many years later, I introduced my daughter to Syl and told her about how much I had been paid. He told me that he would have been willing to bargain to 75 cents. Damn!)
Although I didn’t keep close track, my guess is that the trash over those 3 blocks was over 80 percent of the trash that customers dumped off-site.
By the way, I have a vague recall (although it is vague) that after a few weeks of doing this, I realized that it wasn’t much bother to pick up other trash that clearly wasn’t from Syl’s. There wasn’t much of it. I didn’t pick up icky cigarette butts though.
READER COMMENTS
vince
Sep 12 2022 at 6:51pm
Now, what would he have done if the trash was tossed out on the other side of town? Or if it were hidden?
Matthias
Sep 13 2022 at 6:15am
The joys of child labour.
I suspect such an informal arrangement with a teenager would (at least in principle) face more legal scrutiny today?
David Henderson
Sep 13 2022 at 6:34pm
Probably. More’s the pity, as the British say.
Dylan
Sep 13 2022 at 8:26am
Good story. I would be curious if the fact that customers knew that someone was picking up their trash incentivized more customers to litter?
It also illustrates a point about cultural norms. My understanding is that when you were growing up, littering was fairly socially acceptable in Canada and the U.S. By the time I was growing up, that social norm was in the process of changing, and while littering was still fairly common, there was more stigma attached to it. If we saw someone roll down the window of their car and casually toss out a fast food wrapper, we were taught to not think well of them. Also when I was growing up, anti-littering laws seemed to be more readily enforced Maybe it was just a periodic police campaign, but in the 80s we’d read in the paper about litter stings, and we saw several people get pulled over for littering in my smallish community.
Fast forward a couple of decades and casual littering seems pretty rare in most parts of the U.S. I’d guess that the number of people who throw out their burger wrapper out of their car is vastly lower than it was when you were hired to do the job. The cultural norm obviously changed. But I’m curious how. Was it anti-littering laws. Advertising campaigns like Keep America Beautiful? A natural cultural change as society gets richer and values a clean environment more?
David Henderson
Sep 13 2022 at 6:33pm
You write:
I doubt it, because your premise is probably incorrect; I doubt that they knew. You might think that they would notice in the morning, but there wasn’t a huge amount of trash. Also, the kind of people who are thoughtless enough to throw trash out the window are probably also the kind who are relatively oblivious.
Brad abernethy
Sep 13 2022 at 3:48pm
Littering was never socially acceptable in Canada…and I remember clearly in the 60’s that it was severely frowned upon. They used to have billboards and TV and radio ads with an OWL.. the line was ‘Give a hoot, don’t pollute!’ I’ve never done it, and have picked up crap dumped by others, or reported dumping for decades.
David Henderson
Sep 14 2022 at 3:30pm
You write:
The term “socially acceptable” is a slippery one. If it means “social accepted,” then your statement is false. Many people didn’t accept it; some people did. All it takes is 5 or 10% of people to make a mess.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Sep 14 2022 at 12:48pm
Great memory. Reminds me of collecting soft dring bottles and selling them back to soft drink distributors (manly gas stations and grocery stores) at 1/2 cent per bottle.
Both are good examples of the price mechanism avoiding the creation of (internalize) an externality.
Neither sheds much light on what to do when the price mechanism does not avoid creating an externality.
David Henderson
Sep 14 2022 at 3:28pm
You must be older than me. I got 1 cent in cash or 2 cents in merchandise. So I arbitraged with my mother.
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