🔒Cheesecake with a chit: An Ellsworth bakery’s flexible payment options

If you walk into most businesses and forget your wallet, the owner might hold your purchases behind the counter or otherwise suggest you come back some other time.

But in Ellsworth, the owner of Momo’s Cheesecakes Bakery isn’t waiting by the register to check your payment. And no cashiers are watching you peruse the merch from behind the counter.

That’s because, while there is a security system, no one employed by the bakery actively monitors the lipstick-red garage, where people come and go all day long to grab a few freshly made slices (or more) of the massive popular cheesecakes filling the wall-to-wall freezers.

Owner Brenda Ledezma — better known as Momo because of her chatty “motormouth” personality — is almost always in the commercial kitchen built into her home churning out cheesecakes, nipping into the garage to empty the till or restock a freezer.

Customers instead leave a check or cash —  or send a Venmo payment —  in a small lock box in the back, painted to match the facade. If none of those options are available when you’re in the store (or perhaps you’re a Mainebiz reporter with $88 worth of cheesecake but only a $50 in your wallet, and your Venmo app conveniently is crashing), Ledezma lets you figure out the bill later.

“People will leave sticky notes to say, ‘There wasn’t change, so we gave you extra,’ or ‘There wasn’t change, so we owe you $2,” says Ledezma. “We’ve even gotten scratch [lottery] tickets.”

Drive down most any route in the state and you’ll likely encounter a number of such businesses  — purveying anything from bundles of firewood to eggs or produce — without a traditional pay-before-you-go system or a cashier to accept payments. Yet while such honors system businesses are common enough sights in Maine, data on how many are in operation isn’t collected by the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development or the Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry, according to those departments’ spokespersons.

While it may seem like a quirky or laidback way to approach economic transactions, it can help reduce labor costs and allow owners to devote time to other business-building tasks. And such a payment policy might not only result in cost savings; it can help patrons feel an improved sense of self, too.

Jordan LaBouff, an associate psychology professor at the University of Maine who focuses on belief and intergroup bias, agrees that feeling trusted is likely a strong motivational factor at play.

At the end of the day, customers are people. And “people want to see themselves as honest — it’s a powerful social norm — and we want people to be honest,” says LaBouff, adding that many people recognize that dishonest people are “jettisoned from society” and “internalize that desire” to be viewed as honest.

Still, some honors-system businesses appear to be regular targets for theft. Puzzle Mountain Bakery, a roadside pie shop in Newry with nearly 4,000 followers on Facebook alone, noted on the social media site in late June that it was seeing a high rate of theft at the stand.

Ledezma can only recall a couple of times when someone stole from the till, and credits that in part to having a clean, attractive storefront that she says projects a sense of respectability. But she also thinks that being an active part of a small community and having a large fan base are more impactful factors that essentially encourage people to follow the rules even when no one is around to judge them.

Occasionally, people will see Ledezma or her husband, Andres Ledezma, on the street in Ellsworth and will hand them money that they forgot to leave at the store.

“It’s almost like they feel guilty when they see us” and they know they haven’t paid, she says.

In Maine, “you’ve got tight knit communities, people know each other, and one thing we know is that people are better [behaved] when they are observed,” says LaBouff. “That doesn’t just mean there’s a camera or there’s someone nearby, but it means you’re in a community of people who pay attention to each others’ behavior.”

That means that “social norms around honesty are stronger,” he explained. “If you’re stealing a cheesecake from somebody whose name you know, as opposed to some random stranger in a town you don’t live in or on an intersection where hundreds of people are walking by every day and it makes you feel very anonymous.”