Yeah, tool thefts. Indeed something to be wary of, nowadays. Not locking the house is one thing, but not locking the tool shed is another issue entirely.
It’s not the firt time I notice it, but the similarities wrt rural life on both side of the Atlantic are quite striking. For the better and the worst.
Actually, I’ve known people who live in the city who don’t, or don’t often, lock their doors. I think they’re nuts, given the location, but actions and safety don’t always match up.
My in-laws live in a rather well-to-do village of about 1000 people in Hampshire, and they never seem to lock their door unless they’re going away for a while. They also seem to leave their garage door wide open all the time. Personally I’d have thought it would be exactly the sort of place opportunistic thieves might head for - lots of big houses, not too far from London, but AFAIK they’ve never had anything stolen.
I live in one of the safest municipalities in the country. No really, there was a survey thingie that came out not too long ago, and we were listed high up on the list.
I lock my door every day. I don’t really understand people who don’t. I have lived in a big city and in suburbia and small towns, though never “rural”. I just don’t get it. Why leagive temptation free rein? I would freak if I thought the UPS guy stepped inside my house to leave a package, and I think he’s probably not allowed anyway.
I do have stuff to steal, but that’s not why. It’s just habit. My parents locked their doors. I lock my doors.
We never did. In fact, one time my folks were trying to sell the house and the realtor had showed it while we were out. When they left, they locked the doors and, well, dad had to kick in the back door.
You big old whore. 
I’m renting in a house where the homeowner never locks it. I don’t even have a key. It’s a medium-sized collegetown with a pretty small local population, and we live on a dead-end street where the houses are few and far between. Never lived anywhere before this where I didn’t lock the doors. I was uneasy about it at first, but nothing’s happened yet so I stopped worrying. We don’t even get people on our street, just stray cats and the occasional deer.
I live 30 minutes away from you, in the same county, and leave my doors unlocked. We only lock them at night and if we’re going to be away for a long period of time. I never lock my car.
It would be pretty stupid of any business not to be able to lock its doors. When some drunk in the parking lot starts swinging a baseball bat around, do you really want to have to just stand at the doors and say, “Please, sir, we ask you not to come in, we’re waiting for the constabulary to arrive”?
And a pretty easy one to debunk. Surely someone occasionally goes to a Denny’s, no?
I’m an IHOP man myself
I grew up in a town of about 5,000 people. Nobody seemed to lock their doors much, though I didn’t go around checking. In a town where everybody knows everybody, that’s one of the many things you don’t do. My parents did take the car keys with them when they went downtown to shop. The only time they’d lock the car doors downtown was in the fall time when the garden harvests were coming in, to prevent people from putting a giant paper grocery bag of zucchinis (or whatever the bumper crop of the year was) into the car.
There was a morning when my parents woke up to find a drunk guy sleeping on their couch, right next door to their bedroom. He had turned the wrong corner, and ended up just walking in the house. They fed him breakfast in the morning and sent him on his way. Turned out he was a young guy who worked for my brother at a local grocery store. That had to be pretty awkward to learn who those old people were from your boss. After that, my parents locked the door at night for a while.
I imagine I would still get scoffed at for locking my car in my home town. I can live with that.
I’ve always locked my doors in my own home because I’ve always lived in a city after moving away from my parent’s home. I suspect my kids will too. I have certainly yelled at them enough for forgetting to lock up.
It kind of annoys me that on one hand, this whole not locking anything deal relies on people watching over their neighbors, but if anybody questions anything, they are a busybody old lady. I started a neighborhood watch in my neighborhood 10 years ago, but lost interest in running it after being called Mrs Kravitz by some of the neighbors. Forget that, I have better things to do then.
It ain’t unique to the US- my Grandpa was only persuaded, with difficulty, to start locking his door during the last year of his life, three years ago. He lived in Ellesmere Port; hardly a tiny middle class village, though he did grow up somewhere more rural.
My parents, however, do live in a tiny middle class village, and though they generally lock their door when they’re out, they often forget and no-one worries about it. It woudn’t surprise me if some people there didn’t bother locking up at all. In winter, people leave cars running on the street to warm up, and no-one thinks anything of it.
I’ve lived in areas with as few as 2,000 and as many as 8,000,000 people and I’ve always locked my doors. Preventing people looking for easy crimes to commit is part of that, obviously, but I can’t be the only one who saw Jurassic Park and thought how fucking stupid they were to use door handles that could be opened by animals? That is all I need, some angry moose or polydactyl bear being able to wander into my house, eat my pets and shit in my bath tub because it never occurred to me to lock the door! 
I grew up in a small town (about 1000 people), and while my family locked their doors (we lived on Main St), many of my friends’ did not. At least until there was a series of thefts during the high school football game (where half the town attended).
Something similar nearly happened when I visited my sister in very rural Colorado. My spouse (having lived their whole life in cities of 100,000+) “helpfully” locked the door as we were all leaving to go out. Of course no one had a door key, but they had a spare hidden away someplace, fortunately.
While I can understand not realizing the door locking habits of different locales, a good rule of thumb is never a lock something you don’t have a key for.
The Drive-By Truckers turn the friendliness angle on its head in their song “Sinkhole”, in which the narrator describes the house at his family farm as having “five generations of an unlocked door and a loaded burglar alarm”.
In our small eastern Kentucky town we lock the door when we’re going somewhere, and before we go to bed when we think to (which is almost never). There are plenty of thieves about, but they’re mostly desperate pillheads who don’t have any sense (or they wouldn’t be desperate pillheads). So even though breaking into our house would be trivial I don’t worry much about it. I don’t worry about them coming in at night and hurting us because if said pillheads get hold of a gun they’re not going to use it to commit armed robbery–they’re going to trade it for pills.
I do, however, lock my car pretty faithfully, only because I keep a prescription pad in the glove box.
That’s not a town! That’s, like, a village at best. Maybe a commune!
ETA: jeepus’ story reminds me of a story of my own. I lived in an apartment in Cohoes and one night we were awoken at 12:30 by someone rattling the door lock. Afraid, I got the phone while my SO asked who was at the door, etc.
Turned out it was our drunk-ass neighbor, stumbling home from the bar, trying to get in the wrong apartment. He was actually a whole apartment section over.
So, another reason to lock the doors - idiotic drunken sods.
Except when they do studies, it turns out that the overwhelming majority of stolen cars are the ones who have keys in the ignition or elsewhere in the car, which implies that they’re not locked, either. This story from this week showed that in one town 83% of the cars that got stolen had the keys inside them. Doesn’t look like a false sense of security to me!
I lived in Dubai for three years and never locked the door. I am not sure I even had a key. For the cool winter months (Jan-Mar), the front door was open 24 hours a day most of the time. There was a gate in the yard at the front of the house, but if you opened that, you could walk right in. No locks. Nobody ever bothered us. It was ok to leave the keys in the ignition of the car too. I know a guy in Bahrain that would go to London for 3 months and leave his house unlocked and his Mercedes in the driveway with the keys in the ignition.
My old neighbor started closing his barn door at night after finding a mountain lion in his barn one morning. He walked through the open door, flipped on the lights, and had what he referred to as an “underwear-changing experience.”
It’s really very simple. If my doors are unlocked and someone “breaks in” and steals stuff, all I lose is the stuff. If I lock the doors, they’ll break one of my sliding glass doors with a rock, and then I lose the stuff AND an expensive door.
Hey, I live in an incorporated CITY with a population of 2,300 people. The smallest incorporated city in Montana is about five miles away and has a population of 80.
Well, fine, but I can sit in my living room at midnight and hear the occassional street creature idly trying the front doorknob. So I lock my doors.
The Denny’s near me has normal doors with a lock.