One of Athens' many paradoxes that I have an ongoing fascination with is that of its kiosks, squat huts with goods hanging off of every surface—snack food, ice cream, cigarettes and beer—like the trashiest part of a supermarket condensed and transplanted onto every street corner.  These kiosks flourish everywhere, bringing convenience—at a slight markup, of course—to a city without 24/7 liquor stores.

It is their success that I do not understand.  They are staffed by only one person who is seated in a central position, surrounded by more merchandise in every direction than one person could possibly keep track of.  Theft is not only an inviting prospect, but an obvious one.  Yes, there is a narrow gunport of a window on each side, but with 360 degrees of stuff and no cameras to augment less than 360 degrees of vision, all it takes is a simple legitimate transaction to distract the proprietor from something illegitimate occurring beyond their view.

There are safeguards; the fridge door beeps when opened—an unreliable measure, but it's something.  I haven't seen any extensive use of mirrors to expand the field of view, but it would make sense to do so.  What strikes me is that these kiosks have the audacity to exist in a society where to not take something—fair or not, legal or not—when given the opportunity to do so is a sign of stupidity, a mindset that extends all the way back to ancient Athens' aristo-democracy of the privileged, where corruption was so commonplace it was practically institutionalized.  Today, it is assumed that people in positions of power are corrupt and capitalize on their positions, and while there are still scandals when they get caught, the citizenry might be angry but it is never surprised.  And those that obtain such positions of power and do not wring as much selfish use out of them as possible are still duller than those who weren't quite smart enough to not get caught.

So how is it that kiosks haven't been shelved as a business concept because of debilitating theft?  First of all, I do not think that kiosks simply absorb the relatively low cost of theft of cheap goods and factor that into their business model.  I think instead that people just don't steal from kiosks.

If kiosks were made unprofitable by theft, they would disappear and the community would lose the convenience they offer—ten seconds and three Euro for thirty cigarettes.  The speed of business at a kiosk easily outstrips the ground floor of the NYSE, and in a city where business generally progresses at a much more leisurely pace, that convenience is conceivably a public good—a boon to the community that each individual has a vested interest in upholding.  In kiosks, perhaps we see a manifestation of the ancient Greek teleology and the primacy of the polis, where the needs of the community—being greater than the sum of its parts—supersedes the needs of the individual.  Surreal and amusing that such ideology is maintained at the lowest levels of city life instead of the highest.