Why Do Kind Strangers Return Our Wallets?

[Pelican Press 0]

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Why Do Kind Strangers Return Our Wallets?

Dear Anonymous Kind Stranger Who Didn’t Include a Return Address:

Thank you for mailing my wallet to South Korea from London, where I lost it a few months ago — possibly in a pub? — while visiting my in-laws with my wife and our toddlers. When I saw the envelope and your handwritten note waiting for me at The New York Times office in Seoul, I gasped.

“Just amazing,” my wife texted back when I told her the news. “Literally no return address?”

Perhaps I shouldn’t have underestimated your capacity for kindness, stranger. People around the world find and return lost property to people like me all the time, directly or through intermediaries, often without telling us who they are.

So what are the odds of getting our lost wallets back, and why do people bother returning them? Here are three things I learned when I investigated.

You’re better off losing wallets in some places than others.

Comprehensive data on lost wallets is scarce, but official data from a handful of big cities offer some clues — and contrasts.

In London, an average of more than 2,000 lost wallets and purses were recovered each month by the city’s transport authority during the 2021 fiscal year, the data show. New York City’s transit system received an average of more than 400 lost wallets per month in 2023.

About four in five of those items never saw their owners again. Transport for London told me that the owner-reunion rate for lost wallets and purses in Fiscal 2021 was 22.6 percent. At the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York, the current rate for all lost items is 18 percent.

Those figures don’t include wallets that were never found or turned in. A common misconception is that reporting a loss activates an “army of finders,” said Les Gray, the chief operating officer for Recipero, a company in Britain that operates an international database of lost-property reports as an effort to stop the movement of stolen goods.

“It’s an impossible area, really,” Mr. Gray said of the lost-and-found business.

But the odds look less impossible in a place like South Korea, where the sense of collective security is so high (and the reach of surveillance cameras so vast) that some people mark their places at cafes with wallets, smartphones or laptops.

Wallets and shopping bags accounted for about 11 percent of the nearly 250,000 lost items found in the South Korean state railway operator’s trains and train stations last year, and the overall rate of return was nearly 57 percent,

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. That means that if someone found a wallet and turned it in — as I did the other day in a station outside Seoul — you were more likely to get it back than not.

On a recent afternoon at Seoul Station, a Times photographer saw wallets, umbrellas and other unclaimed items sitting on racks in a storage room. Each was organized according to its date of recovery.

In another room, two employees behind a plexiglass screen were fielding phone calls and uploading lost property notices to a government website. The closets behind them held items whose owners had already been identified.

Now it was up to the owners to come forward.

Reporters love to cover this stuff.

This article is the latest entry in a genre of journalism about the unexpected return of personal property.

Lost-wallet stories are a pillar of the genre, and long-lost specimens hold particular appeal because their “mundane inventories pile up as suddenly poignant measurements of the passage of time,” as the author Jon Mooallem wrote in

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.

In an example I can relate to, a security guard in Manhattan returned a wallet that a Times journalist had

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. Among the things still inside were pictures of the journalist’s sons when they were boys squirming in a lawn chair.

Roy Peter Clark, the author of several books on writing, told me that lost-and-found news stories resonate because they address universal themes.

“My shrink once told me that the ‘primary crisis of middle life is Loss,’” he said in an email. “So the idea of Lost and Found, or sometimes Found and Lost, turns out to be not just the search for an object, but the power of restoration and discovering.”

Mr. Clark has found so many lost items over the years that his wife calls him the Great Finder. He’s found his own wallet (lost on a back shelf), his wife’s earrings (in the bedsheets) and a stranger’s credit card (in a park).

That stranger, who received the card while mowing his lawn, was astonished that the Great Finder had tracked him down. “What he did not realize is that I am an approval junkie,” Mr. Clark, said, “and there are few better feelings of satisfaction than the look of gratitude.”

Altruism is not the only explanation.

Mr. Clark is on to something. A 2019 study in the journal Science found that strangers returned lost wallets to other strangers not only because they are nice, but also because they would feel bad if they didn’t.

For the study, “

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,” researchers planted more than 17,000 wallets in public places in cities around the world. Each wallet had a key, a handwritten grocery list and business cards with a common male name. Some had varying amounts of local currency; others were cashless.

Research assistants planted the wallets by handing them to a person at a reception desk, asking them “take care of it” and leaving without further explanation.

The results showed that if the wallet contained money, the chances were higher — 51 percent with cash compared with 40 percent without it — that it would be reported. Switzerland had the highest overall reporting rates (79 percent with and 76.4 percent without) and China the lowest (21.5 percent with and 14.3 percent without).

Altruism does not fully explain this, the study’s lead author, Alain Cohn, told me from Michigan. “The increase can be explained by this ******* to be seen as honest,” he said.

In my wallet’s case, the crumpled notes inside were worth less than the postage (the equivalent of about $5) that you paid, stranger. So by Mr. Cohn’s logic, your actions were not only kind but statistically impressive.

If I had your address, I’d print this story out and mail it to you as a way of saying thanks.

Sincerely,

Jun Michael Park contributed reporting.

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