We’ve all seen 'em, we’ve all been the victim of one at some time or another in our life. But, really folks, is there one particular dishonest mode of doing business that cheeses you off more than any other?
My personal nominees are…
The 89 day wonder. Got its start here in Vegas in the casino industry, but has since spread to other types of businesses. It works like this. You have a 90-day probationary period for new hires, at the end of which, those new hires will become eligible for health insurance benefits. You hire people, then, a day, or a few days, before that probationary period ends, you let them go in order to avoid paying said benefits. Alternately, you hire a bunch of people at the beginning of the busy season, then you cut them loose at the end because they “aren’t meeting the standards of service”. Nice way to get temporary help without having to pay extra by hiring people through an agency.
OK, this one is practiced by a chain of discount department stores, which shall remain nameless. You open up two of your huge discount stores in a smallish community, very close to each other, within a short period of time. After you have driven all competition out of business, you close one of the stores, putting hundreds of employees out of jobs.
The Sale that Isn’t. You put a bunch of items on sale, with a sign on the rack or even a price tag on the item stating the sale price. Do not have your UPC people program the sale price into the computer. If you’re lucky, enough of your customers will not be paying attention as the cashiers ring their purchases that you will be able to reap a tidy profit by increasing the volume of sales of the “sale” items.
Bait and Switch. This one’s a classic. Advertise a major sale on item that you have only a limited supply of, or (and a music store I worked for did this) don’t even have in stock. When customers come in to purchase the “sale” items, or call and attempt to order them, you sell them a similar, but more expensive, product.
Ok, the others are dishonest and underhanded, but surely this is just plain illegal? Do they just claim it’s a mistake if anyone notices, or does no-one report them afterwards?
Taking your question literally, I really do like it when salesmen and reps bring gifts – T-shirts, mugs, silly desk toys, etc. I wouldn’t accept a major gift (car, vacation, hooker) in exchange for using their product, but I surely do enjoy the geegaws.
I hate negative option programs. You know, “Buy this one item for really cheap, and without making it clear to you we’ll sign you up to get another cheap-ass product every month for the rest of your life, but charge you double plus shipping and handling each time, unless you specifically tell us every month not to send it.”
Deliberately not re-ordering certain products in order to shift excess stocks of similar products of a lower standard.
Bloody supermarkets. grrrrrrr.
I’d agree with that - its why I love going to exhibitions and trade shows. Normally they turn into competitions to see which one of my team can get the most unusual/interesting freebie:
Salesman: Hi! Would you like to see a demo of our product?
Garius: Do I get one of those branded pens?
Salesman: Ha ha ha - sure!
Garius: Okay then
Salesman: Okay, well as you can see we are using the new Half-Life engine to power our E-Learning solutions. The benefit of this is that…
Garius(Interrupting): Can I have one of those mouse-mats too?
Salesman: What? oh yeah sure. As I was saying, the benefit of this is that we can convey real emotion to the learner - this is incredibly useful when…
Garius(Interrupting): Are those juggling balls? Can I have one?
Salesman: um… yeah. go for it. Where was I? Oh yes… this is incredibly useful when you need to deal with issues such as one-on-one meetings and…
Garius(Interrupting): You know what? I really like your tie…
Set up your job descriptions/titles so that darn near everyone is an exempt* employee. Set billable hour “goals” and especially project deadlines so that everyone will have to work unpaid OT to make them.
Bonus round: Count all hours worked against project budgets as if they’re paid. Link employee compensation to project budget performance (bad because everyone’s working OT). Link bosses’ compensation to overall company performance (good because of all the unpaid OT).
*meaning exempt from the laws requiring paid overtime
At my old job, I was a union steward, and I was informedt ah a co-worker would be going “full time.” Turns out, they were increasing her hours from 20 per week to 38 per week. Of course by shaving 2 hours off the 40 hour work week, they didn’t have to pay her benefits.
I told her she whould fight it and get those two extra hours, but she said she was just happy to get the extra 18.
“Handling” charges are, IMO, the biggest unethical business practice on the planet. Sure, businesses do have legitimate expenses involved in preparing a product for shipping, but those should just be added into the cost of the product. Instead, businesses like to keep the “cost” low in order to attract customers, and then tack on the rest of the cost as a “handling” charge.
I recently saw an ad on TV from a company that markets those “learn at home” type kits on CD-ROM. In their ad, they clai9m they were hugely overstocked and needed to make room for new products, and therefore they were giving away the CDs “absolutely free!” The fine print at the end then informs you that you have to pay something like $5.95 “shipping and handling” for each CD. Of that, $0.95 is probably for the shipping, while the other $5 is the actual cost of the “free” CD that you are buying.
I used to buy a lot of stuff on eBay, but stopped when more and more sellers started charging “handling” fees to make up for their low starting bids and/or reserve prices. I hate it when large companies (who actually have overhead and many employees) charge handling fees – I’m not about to put up with it when it’s an eBay seller working part-time out of his garage.
Ugh. Time Life Books did this to me, even though I made it CRYSTAL CLEAR when I ordered that I under no circumstances was interested in being “enrolled”. They charged my account twice, and sent me one more movie. The labrynth involved in unenrolling drove me batty. Add to the mix, the commercial showed several Monty Python clips, and only a couple were on the DVD I received, so toss in Bait and Switch as well.
I used to sell TVs and such for a now defunct store named Donaldson’s. They would constantly advertise incredible deals on out of production/out of stock TVs. I’m not sure if it was bait and switch, I’m fairly certain it was, but the management and marketing folks there had proven themselves clueless several times over, so it’s up in the air.
You subscribe to a new phone operator (In Europe in some countries you dial a prefix if you want to change the operator) just to find out that the new operator changed the settings of your phone line so that every call is via this operator.
A complain on the hotline produced this remark of the lady on the line: “If we didn’t do things like that we would never have customers”.
Needless to say that we unsubscribed totally immediately.
Last night, I read a news magazine article about how wages are being cut; work is being out-sourced to other countries and companies are not looking at employees as assets anymore. It will get better when the economy improves, but it will never go back to where it was in the past.
In WV (maybe all over, I dunno), the law is that if you work 8 hours, you’re entitled to a 30 minute (unpaid lunch) and two(?) 15 minute paid breaks — unless your employer gives you MORE than 30 minutes for lunch, then he can nix the breaks.
So lunch break at Satan’s Little Hell Hole was 35 minutes.
I understand that this is just an opinion and that it’s something that you’re personally not comfortable with.
But if I could just point out: Businesses (usually) are not simply “tacking on the rest of the cost as a handling charge.” It really does cost money to pay people to prepare goods for shipping, as you mentioned. Shipping is not free, either.
Why should a business pay all the costs involved in getting their product to your door? Typically, end-users pay all taxes and costs associated with owning the product. There are exceptions however this is usually only with high-volume purchases.
One way or another, businesses MUST make money in order to stay in business, and keep people employed.
If they can’t make money on the product itself, they certainly can’t afford to deliver that product to end-users free of charge. (It could be argued that they shouldn’t be in business in that case) That way lies bankruptcy for the company and job searching for their employees.
It’s not (usually) unethical. It’s just bottom-line accounting.
Here’s an unethical practise for ya: Adding a percentage onto pre-paid & charge invoices just for the cash grab. One supplier in particular sent us a shipment via a carrier who prints the cost of shipping onto the bill of lading, which goes onto the cartons. When we got the invoice, that shipping charge was 50% more. We confronted them, deducted it from their invoice and check every shipping charge from this company now. They haven’t done it again, because they know we’re onto them.
How’s this unethical? The employee agreed that he could be fired before the end of 90 days and he wouldn’t get benefits during that time. The employee is then fired at the end of 90 days. What’s the big deal? The employee should have bargained for more if that’s what they wanted. The employee in this situation is not getting screwed.
How’s this unethical? Do you think that whenever a company hires an employee the company must employ the employee forever or the company is doing something unethical?
I think that what the OP calls “unethical” most folks just call “capitalism.” This is just how stuff works, and like it or not, it’s the best economic system the world has ever seen.
The bait and switch concept seems to be integral to the American way of doing business these days. If you ever try to rent a car, add $100 onto the price you’re given when you pick the car up to figure out how much you’ll be made to pay when you return the car. And consider the case of the amazing infating interest rate:
vibrotronica and his vibro-babe decide to buy a house together. After considerable shopping around, a mortgage company is chosen because they promise–in writing–a 6.0% interest rate. Suspecting the worst about banker-types (from experience), vibrotronica asks the loan officer “Is there anything that could happen that will change these numbers?” The loan officer says “No. Absolutely not.” The usual weeks-long runup to the transaction proceeds as normal until the day before closing, which just happens to coincide with the beginning of the Iraq War. vibro-babe recieves a call from the loan officer. “I was just calling to see if you wanted to lock your interest rate in at 7.0%.” she says. “I thought it was 6.0%” says vibro-babe.
“No, it wasn’t locked in, and now that this war has started the markets are going crazy.” says loan officer.
“I think you’d better call vibrotronica and talk to him about it.”
During the phone call that follows, the loan officer attempts to tell vibrotronica that he really doesn’t know how the loan market works and that he should immediately sign the documents she is faxing him before the rate goes up to 8.0% or higher. vibrotronica asks why he was told that he would recieve a 6.0% interest rate three weeks ago and now, the day before closing, he is contacted about “locking in” the rate. “Well, we didn’t know there was going to be a war.” says the loan officer.
“That’s odd. I knew there was going to be a war in September. Are you stupid or just ill-informed?”
“Sir, I’m not stupid…”
“Then you are a war profiteer.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I get the 6.0% rate that I was promised or I find a bank that will stick to its word.”
Hours later, vibrotronica is in the middle of calling a dozen other lending institutions when the loan officer calls back and says she has “special permission” from “upstairs” to give the vibro-household the rate she promised three weeks ago. Needless to say, the meeting to sign the loan papers was very tense.
Triss, a lot of companies in the US now are lowering the “price” and adding on junk fees. Airlines, utilities, etc.
What if the grocery store added 5 cents to the cost of a can of beans at the register? Delivery charge (to the store), they do have to pay for that after all. Then there’s the stocking fee, storage, etc. that they could take on.
Handling fees are no different from this. Your logic applies to both scenarios. Businesses should only be allowed to state one price with no additional fees.
[ul][li]Opt-out products and services. Not necessarily unethical, although certainly dubious when the key information is hidden in the small print, or when the vendor makes it as hard as possible to opt-out (this means your free 3-month trial offers, AOL).[/li][li]Warranties. Already under government investigation in the UK, I believe. Enormous business for electrical retailers, but the terms and conditions make the damn things pointless most of the time.[/li]Small businesses that serially hire employees on an unpaid trial period. Very common in some non-chain fast food places. Hire students or backpackers, put them on a week’s trial, then let them go at the end of the week. Then do the same again the next week, and so on.[/ul]
