One Man's Admirable Quest To Find Owner Of $50 Lost In Summit

On summer Sunday mornings, I typically start my day by walking to the gym for my workout. A man of settled habits, I take the same route each time – listening to WNYC, checking out what’s blooming in neighbors’ yards.

This past Sunday, about a block into my walk, I looked down and saw a $50 bill, folded in fourths, that must have fallen out of someone’s pocket. For a moment, I thought about leaving it on the sidewalk, on the assumption that whoever lost it would retrace his or her steps. But I decided to pick it up, put it in my gym bag and see if I could reunite the money with its owner.

I quickly realized that I was launching into an unscientific – but revealing – experiment about human behavior.

That afternoon, I posted about my “discovery” on Nextdoor, assuming that’s where neighbors would be most likely to stumble upon such information:

Having gotten no reaction there, a day later I turned to Facebook, posting in the “Summit NJ Happenings” group:

Now my study of human psychology began to get some traction. Spoiler alert: there are a bunch of smart-alecks on social media. Like the neighbor who said, “That bill is mine! A Gremlin took it from my pocket!”

But that wasn’t the prevailing response.

More typical was this comment: “Thank you - that’s a wonderful way to handle this situation!” And this one, which shows how simple events can resonate deeply: “I hope the owner finds you. When I was in the second grade, I lost $7.10 in a coin purse. And my father drove me back to the store, and we walked the aisles. Fond memory of my father, but would have been sweeter if someone found it and returned it.”

A meaningful reaction came from a new neighbor, who lives near the spot where I found the money: “We love the neighborhood however it’s posts like this that reaffirm our decision to move here.”

Leave it to my wife, Pam, to make the bigger point: “There are folks for whom losing $50 is catastrophic. If we could reunite the money with someone in desperate need that would be a huge win. If not, the Community Food Bank will help many with the money.”

Research shows that most people are more inclined than you might assume to return found money. A study published in Science earlier this year describes how economists “lost” 17,000 wallets in 40 countries around the world over the course of three years. The percentage of returned wallets varied – from highest in Scandinavian countries to lowest in China, Morocco, Peru and Kazakhstan, with the United States smack in the middle. But consistently, the more money there was in a lost wallet, the more likely people were to try to reunite it with its owner.

I’d still like to find the person who lost that $50 bill. That’s why I’m publishing this article. If the money is yours, email me at jimschachter50@gmail.com.

If I don’t have a credible claimant by the end of the week, I’ll follow this advice from one of my Facebook posters: “Why not just donate to the Food Bank and bypass the entire experiment?” If you want to do the same, go to the Food Bank's website and click where it says “DONATE NOW.”