That's pretty smart to slowly add.. U might actually be getting small bonus...say ur at 10lbs then u slowly start adding more, once u r past 10.5 maybe 10.6 or 10.7 it will read 1. So someone is getting cheated a little almost every time
You're so right somebody is getting screwed for that difference every time something is weighed on a scale. Could be the customer or it could be the yard it's

% of times it happens to one or the other. The odds of it happening every time in favour of the yard well that thinking is screwed, as well as if the yard thinks it's getting screwed.
It comes down to the basic thing called TRUST, and the old time thinking of customer screwed yard/yard screws customer is so ingrained that it's just the second nature for everyone to think of this philosophy first.
Yes it's always good to get a little free bonus in life but when it comes at the expense of another then it's just wrong.
When I opened up a yard it was that a person got paid the scale weight of what the product was, nothing more-nothing less. If the scale fell on the 2 or the 3 well that was it. The customer base liked the fact the scales were tested 4 times a year and the finding of the certification was freely posted on the wall, and that was showing I had nothing to hide.
To gain the trust of a person is one of the hardest things in life, and when there was many companies and private individuals that regularly dropped off their scrap and didn't even watch the weigh in, they just came back for the payment as it was going to be the same and their time was worth something more than watching us do the weigh.
Everyone that worked at the company treated everyone the same as I truly believed that until the payment was processed the metal still belonged to the customer, and I didn't know if the customer weighed their scrap before filling a bin that we'd pick up, or the small load the person dropped off, and it was not in my interest to muddy my name for the little short term gain of a few dollars. It's comes down to simple honesty and if a person has a problem with the yard then change your yard, if a person thinks that they're getting screwed all the time then it comes down to the lack of trust in everything in life.