I don’t think offering a cash reward is necessarily tacky. As someone mentioned upthread, it often makes the offering person happy to give some small token with their thanks. Also, if the person has gone out of their way to get it back to you, I would most definitely offer some cash for gas or whatever.
For person A to ask for a reward is unspeakably gauche.
Joe
This was exactly what I was going to post. I probably wouldn’t even have thought “Ooh, wouldn’t it be nice to gt a reward.” I don’t return stuff, to get a reward. I do it because I know it sucks to lose stuff.
Once a woman found my wallet, googled me, called me and returned the wallet to my house. I was so broke that I gave her a little houseplant that I had recently bought for about $3 and re-potted in a pretty pot I already owned. Otherwise I could have given her like $5, which seemed pretty paltry.
I’ve accepted a reward, also when incredibly broke. The wallet was PACKED with money, so much that I was, I’m ashamed to say, tempted. At the time I was a student and selling plasma to supplement my income. I called the women right away and she came and got it and gave me a $50 bill from the wallet. I wanted to refuse but I really needed the money. Not my best moment.
I protest that last statement.
Asking for a reward is gauche. Accepting one is not.
I agree. Accepting a reward, particularly when the giver can probably afford it, and the reciever is on the down and out, is nothing to be ashamed of. I’d say thats a scenario when both parties are being the best they can be in more ways than one.
It wouldn’t have even occurred to me to want a reward. It would have been a joy to me to have made someone’s day by returning their item.
I was at a concert recently with my girlfriend. She wanted to buy a t-shirt so we were in line at a vending booth. While we were there I saw an iPod Touch on the ground. I held it up and yelled out, “Hey did anyone drop an iPod?” This twelve year old girl who was there with her Mom said it was hers and just grabbed it from me and started playing with it. She didn’t even acknowledge me let alone say, “thank you.” I found that pretty offensive. Her Mom offered to buy me a shirt (which were priced at an insane $30) but I refused her offer.
Always poor-form to ask for a reward, of course; I’ve noticed that people who lose cellphones tend to do so at the homes of friends, or parties, and whatnot. In other words, they commonly know the person who found it. If a stranger alerted me that they found my cellphone, I believe I’d give them $20, but never refer to it as a “reward” – I suppose because I think of rewards as money people put up to overcome others’ bad intentions, and this bugs me.
Once, I did have to pick up a cellphone, come to think of it. It was located in a mall, someone called my home #, and I got it. They happened to be someone I sorta knew, and I didn’t offer a reward; it was an odd situation, though, because I’m almost certain someone had taken it from my car the night before and left it in the mall – I had not been anywhere near the mall, and some shady college characters were in my back seat the night before. Weird.
Finland’s law allows finders to request a 10% finder’s fee if they take expensive lost property to the official lost and found (usually a police station). I deliver newspapers during the night in the center of this town so I see a lot of lost stuff on the streets. When I found somebody’s electronic blood sugar tester and took it to the police station, I didn’t ask for reward, but when I found a 100+ euro cellphone later on I did.
If I had managed to track down the owner myself without any big hassle, I wouldn’t have really cared if I had gotten nothing for my troubles. Messed that option up when I first shut down the phone, thinking I’d call/message people on the phone’s list after I had finished working, only to see it required the PIN code to start up again. So I took that to the police too and figured out the 10% of its value was what my time was worth, travelling to the police station and filling the paperwork and such. I guess that makes me a bad guy compared to all the saints who have posted on this thread. 
If I wanted to be paid for delivering an item I would have become a FedEx truck driver. It is incredibly tacky to ask for a reward if you find a wallet. If the only way to get the wallet back to the person involved some expense on my part (a $50 cab ride, etc) I’d ask them to contribute, but I’d probably put that up front. And really that isn’t a realistic scenario - either it wouldn’t be much out of my way or the person would make the effort to get it from me.
I make the effort to return the wallet not because I want to get paid, but because I feel empathy for the horrible lost wallet feeling. From a more selfish perspective I am also helping ensure I live in a world where people return your things for when I might lose my wallet …
Why the heck do you have these phones? If you found them but the battery was dead, why’d you take them? That just means that if the owner retraces their steps, they won’t be able to find their phone. And for ones where the battery wasn’t dead, why not look in their address book? Or take them to the police station?
That just seems really freaky weird.
This might be off-topic since it didn’t involve a reward, but I still find this funny. A couple years ago, I got a call from a friend’s cell phone. Turns out he’d lost it in a cab and the driver was calling random numbers in his address book.
Cabbie: Some guy left this phone in my cab, do you know him?
Me: Yeah, he’s a friend of mine.
Cabbie: Where does he live? Maybe I can drop it off.
Me: He lives in Bloomingdale, I’ll have to look up the address.
Cabbie: Bloomingdale??? I picked him up in Waukegan and took him to the airport! What the hell was he doing in Waukegan if he lives in Bloomingdale???*
Me: Um… I don’t know. I don’t really keep tabs on him.
Cabbie: Well, he was at some office building in Waukegan. That’s a hell of a long way from Bloomingdale!
Me: Uh, yeah… Well, if you give me your number I can e-mail and tell him to call you.
Cabbie: Yeah, cause I ain’t driving all the way to Bloomingdale fer Chrissakes! What the hell was he doing in Waukegan?
Me: I don’t know, but I’ll definitely tell him to call you and you guys can work something out.
Cabbie: Yeah, OK, you do that. *(gives me his number.) *Bloomingdale! Jeez!
Me: … Um… Yeah, Bloomingdale… OK then, thanks for calling, I’ll make sure he gets the message.
Cabbie: Jeez, what the hell was he doing in Waukegan?
Me: Still don’t know, OK, bye now…
I e-mailed my friend and he did get the phone back, though I don’t recall the details of the exchange. The next time I saw him we had a good laugh over this guy’s utter incredulity that anyone would get picked up by a cab from someplace he doesn’t live!
*Bloomingdale and Waukegan are two suburbs of Chicago, about an hour drive from each other.
If I were Person B, I’d be put off. That’s tacky as fuck.
Here’s how I was socialized:
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Do not expect rewards for returning anything to their rightful owner. All I’ve been taught to expect is a thank you or other gesture of gratitude. In the bar situation, a beer would have been nice, but it’s cool if all I got was a “Thank you.”
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In the event you are offered a reward, you decline it. At this point, it may end up as a battle of wills. In the bar situation, say, if the person I’m returning the phone to is insisting on giving me, say twenty bucks, I’d decline at least twice and, if he’s still pressing it, offer to call it even with a beer.
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If anything lost is returned to you, you should display sincere thanks and, if you have the means, you can offer a material gesture of thanks. In the OP’s situation, I’d probably buy the guy a beer. (The way I was taught was the social dance that you offer a reward, the other person should decline it, and you go back and forth three times. The third time you offer, if the person really needs it, he will take the reward but, more often than not, he doesn’t and that’s the end of it. That may be peculiar to my area/upbringing.)
Now, I’ve found cell phones in the past and returned them, and I don’t believe anyone has ever offered me a reward. It never even occurred to me to expect one. As long as I get a grateful “thanks,” I’m happy.
The only time I’ve been actively ticked returning a found object was an ATM card. As a poor college student, I went to a drive-up ATM on foot. As the truck in front of me took off, I went to put in my card, only to see “Would you like to make another transaction?” on the screen. He forgot his card, and now I had an opportunity to withdraw money from his account, if I were so inclined. Anyhow, I pressed “no,” took the card, and continued along my way.
When I got home, I managed to find his name and address in the local phone book. I called, told him I found an ATM card, asked him a few questions to ascertain his identity (what bank? what time of day? what was the transaction amount–I had the receipt, too.) I offered to return it. So, before my shift at work, I drove to him to drop off the card (I confirmed his address on the phone). I ring his doorbell, he suspiciously cracks the door open, asking me to identify myself. I tell him I’m the guy who called earlier. “Do you have my card?” he asks. I say I do and offer it up to him. He grabs the card and closes the door. Not even a thanks. Not even an acknowledgment. That would have had me fuming, if I didn’t find it so bizarre.
And the one time I lost something extremely valuable: One night in Budapest I started going to a new pub down the street. At closing time, we decided to move on to another pub. About an hour or so of drinking later, I realize I don’t have my camera bag with me. Now, I was working as a (the) full-time photographer for an English-language business newspaper there at the time, so my entire livelihood was in that bag. Like $10,000+ of it. I was fucked if I lost that bag. I didn’t have any money that early in my career to replace the lost gear, and I didn’t have any insurance on that stuff. So I retraced my steps, starting with the cab, and ending at the first bar. Unfortunately, the first bar was closed, and I couldn’t find out until the morning whether they had my bag.
First thing in the morning, after a nervous sleep, I rush to the bar and find Robert the owner/bartender working. I ask him if anyone found a black bag here last night. (He wasn’t working that shift). He asks me what kind of bag? Like a plastic bag? Shit, I think, he has no fucking idea what I’m talking about. The bag must be gone. No, I say, a black, rectangular canvas-type bag. He goes into the kitchen and comes back with it a moment later. I did my best to offer him a couple hundred bucks for the trouble, but he adamantly refused. Nothing I could do could convince him to take any reward money. That’s the type of behavior I was taught. Anyhow, he got his reward in our continued and extensive (nearly daily in some spurts) patronage at that bar.
Just got around to reading this. Wow. That’s a bit worse than my story. Good grief, what the fuck is wrong with some people?
The golden rule of treating others as you would want to be treated, would no doubt be assumed to state the fact that everyone would want their cell phone handled with integrity, and that they would neither expect the finder to go out of their way, nor want the finder to go out of their way OR expense in returning the phone.
A reward should NOT be expected. However, the inability to immediately retrieve the phone without further inconvenience to the finder would not only warrant a consideration for their cooperation, but would be appropriate for them to ask what they may expect in return for facilitating the phone’s return.
Who would think there would be a reward? You returned the phone to the rightful owner. You would want someone to do that for you.
I wouldn’t ask for or really expect a reward for something that is nice, but neither difficult nor dangerous. I’d take one if it was offered, but I wouldn’t be offended if it wasn’t; probably wouldn’t even think of it, really.
I wouldn’t even ask. It’s low class.
Zombies don’t want their phone’s back…they only want your BBBBBRRRRAAAAIIIIIINNNNSSS
I’m sure others have said it but I wouldn’t mind. In my case I probably wouldn’t have asked or even hinted that some reward would be appropriate in the first place.