So, not sure where to put this, but it's tech-related...
Here at the resort, they have a system for pool towels. You use your room key to retrieve towels from an automated kiosk. You can return towels to any other automated kiosk with a receptacle. They claim that every towel is tracked electronically and there's a $20 fee for non-returned towels.
As an engineer, I know that such a system is trivially easy to set up. Simple RFID tagging sewn into each towel and having RFID scanning in the dispenser and in each receptacle would allow you to pretty easily track when the towels were removed and when they were returned.
But as an engineer, I also know how technology can sometimes be prone to failures, unreliable or intermittent operation. The chances for errors occurring a small percentage of time across a population of likely thousands (and maybe >10K) towels across a giant resort would mean that there would be errors regularly. And that charging guests $20 for a towel they did, indeed, return, would create a lot of pissed off and argumentative customers. And that I'm guessing towel theft is probably not THAT big of a deal that the added cost of trying to implement this system and make it robustly error-free enough to avoid creating angry guests might ultimately be a losing proposition.
So... I think this might all be security theater. They have the dispenser and the system to make guests believe that Big Brother is watching their towel usage just so the guests are vigilant about returning the towels, but that there's actually no true enforcement mechanism at all...
What say you?
