In the case of Best Buy, I would consider actually carrying out TVs and not paying for them to be morally acceptable. Some stores deserve to be stolen from, because that’s how they do business. They’ve already established the precedent.
I can’t imagine why. I could see the police nicely asking you to return the item or a potential for a civil suit (doesn’t mean they’ll win) but I doubt the criminal code covers it. That said, I’m sure there’s a bajillion federal, state and local codes covering theft so this isn’t something I’d stake my life on; I’m just skeptical.
In an online situation, you’re looking at someone who was supposed to enter the sale amounts/percentages making an error. Like my previous examples, it’s sometimes easy to see what happened just based on the discount percentage when they double-up a 50% or 75% discount. I wouldn’t think that there’s a significant difference between taking advantage of a teenage cashier and a 20-odd year old doing website data entry except that one of them you don’t have to look in the eyes.
Best Buy canceled all the orders for the $200 gift cards. The very few that made it out were apparently only loaded for the $15 the customer paid on them. I couldn’t even vouch for that last bit since only one or two reports of someone receiving a card came out and they may have been faked or apocryphal.
Is that a morally salient fact for you? If so, feel free to keep that setting and assume you know the garage sale proprietor.
Are you saying that since this scenario will seldom arise in the real-world, you’re incapable of forming a moral intuition about it?
Ha, I can’t argue with that too much.
But at the physical store there might not be a senior person supervising and saying it’s okay for the super deep discount to happen, but for online sales there probably is a senior person checking before shipments go out the door at a super deep discount. Or even if there isn’t normally for every shipment, they’ll be paying attention when there’s something newsworthy like the $200 gift cards for $15. It would make me feel less sneaky knowing that there’s someone in charge who can okay it for online sales, rather than just hoping I can sneak out the door at the physical store without anyone in charge noticing how cheap I’m getting something.
We could start a whole new thread about “Games you can play at the Self-Checkout”.
No, I’m saying I don’t understand the scenario. Even if I try to get inside the head of whoever priced something, how can I ever know what type of mistake they made if any?
At a garage sale, generally, the person is just trying to get rid of stuff, not maximize profit per item, so I would actually assume that they do not care what the item’s value is. They had ample opportunity to put the time into researching prices, so if they chose not to, that’s on them. If they just wrote the wrong number on a tag and I somehow “know” this–maybe I overhear them talking to someone else about it, but their child is the one ringing people up and so does not notice the mistake–then I know they are not intending to sell it at that price and would call over the adult to confirm the price.
Personally, I would NOT want someone to point out that I’d underpriced my garage sale items. I’ve already decided not to pick through and research everything and sell it on eBay or whatever, because I just want it gone now. I don’t need others trying to complicate the situation and impede my disposal of items I don’t want. Take your good deals and go away!
I assume that if they just wanted to get rid of it, they would have taken it to Goodwill.
It doesn’t have to be $200 for $15; as I said, there’s times you see doubled up discounts or times a discount code may be stackable twice or other events. Hang out on deals sites and you’ll see this stuff on a pretty regular basis. Not $200 gift cards but getting a $10 USB charger for under a buck and stuff like that.
Unless it’s something major like Best Buy realizing that they just sold 10,000 gift cards in an hour, there probably isn’t any senior person checking this stuff. Heck, half the time the “digital merchant” portion is handled by a third party and the guys at the warehouse filling boxes based on automated packing slips is someone else entirely.
Anyway, I’m not sure “It’s okay if I sneak one past the senior online order guy but not okay if I sneak one past the cashier” is really a sound argument.
A lot of charity thrift stores are picky about what they will take, as they only have so much space. Why risk hauling stuff there only to have to haul it away again when they can instead make a few dollars while sitting at home?
Practically the entire point of shopping at a garage sale is the hope of finding stuff at bargain prices. If garage sale shopping means I am supposed to revalue the stuff and pay what it’s “worth” or feel I am committing an immoral act by simply paying the asked prices (heaven forbid I bargain!), I’d obviously not bother; if everyone behaved the same way, there would be no garage sale customers, which would obviously NOT be in the would-be sellers’ interests.
Maybe I’m not explaining myself well, but I’m saying that online I’d feel better because I’m NOT sneaking it past the senior online guy. The senior online guy can check things and prevent a sale if it’s not kosher. This is compared to in stores where the senior guy might be running around and not see what the junior cashier is doing.
If you are selling to make a few dollars, then certainly you’d prefer to make more rather than less. If they just want to get rid of the stuff, they wouldn’t even charge. That they are selling it indicates that yes, they are hoping to get money for it, and yes of course they care about how much money they can get.
In Massachusetts and I believe many other states, there’s actually a law that if there’s a mismatch between the sticker/shelf tag, and what the scanner actually rings up, the store must honor the lower price. There are exceptions if the price is clearly a huge mistake - e.g. $1 for a $100 item - but in general, if stores don’t keep the shelf tag and inventory database in sync, that’s too bad for them.
A few years ago I found an old paperback *Dying of the Light *by George RR martin at Half Price Books. Flipped the title page open and what do you know…it was signed by GRRM. The store clearly didn’t know it and I wasn’t going to tell them. Paid $1.25 (or whatever) and went on my way. Looks like on ebay something like this might go for $30, but I’m not going to sell it. I don’t think I stole or had any moral obligation to tell the store what’d they’d overlooked.
But you are. If it’s an error, it’s an error. Maybe someone catches it, maybe they don’t but you’re the one trying to buy a widget at 96% off due to a pricing mistake.
You’re in the market for an item. You see it on a website advertising a 50-75% off sale. This item is 94% off (75% + 75%). Do you put it in your cart and attempt to check out? Do you contact the website? Do you just decline to buy it? If you picked the first one, you’re trying to slip it past the system, are you not? Success or not, how is that different than trying to slip one past a cashier?
I suspect most people would buy it and I suspect this is because online purchasing is removed enough from human interaction that they can self-rationalize it easier than having to stand around looking guilty in front of some retail wage-slave (or risk being caught and put on the spot).
Not me. If I want to make more money from the stuff, I would not sell it at a garage sale. I would instead do the work of selling by some other means, researching each value, making an eBay listing, monitoring the auctions, packaging the items, going to the mailing facility, etc.
If I’m not willing to do the work and am instead satisfied with pricing my items as I see fit at my garage sale, I don’t need, want, or expect others to do the work for me and give me extra money I wasn’t even asking for.
And what I’m trying to get at is why you find the two situations morally different. In one, you point out that the person, with further effort, could have ascertained the market price. And that’s true. But it’s also true that with due care they could have prevented the mis-charging.
If both mistakes could be avoided with effort (or due care, or whatever), are you morally blameless in both? If so, why is that factor morally relevant?
From my perspective, the shopowner (or garage salers) negligent valuation of an item isn’t really different from their negligent charging you the wrong price. Both could be solved by more effort on their part. Instead, I think we regard them as different because one is categorical (a different price than intended) and one is not (a difference in valuation that is large enough to be an error, whereas a smaller differential would just be regarded as the vagaries of the market). But I’m not sure, which is why I was trying to explore your intuitions on the subject.
In one case, they chose not to put forth extra effort. In the other, it seems they erred in spite of making effort.
If you are shopping at a garage sale, and see an item that you know is under-valued and would command a much higher price if it were sold on eBay, and you think it is your moral imperative to inform the seller of this, then why are you even shopping at a garage sale to being with? People shop at garage sales to get things at a bargain.
And in terms of things ringing up at a store at a lower price than I thought, I would never think “Oh ho! I am clearly being undercharged and this must be rectified immediately!” No, I would think that something was on sale at a higher percentage than I originally thought, because many times, stores add on extra percentages off when you go to checkout! It’s not a mistake.
Both those examples are very different from a cashier actually making a mistake and handing you back more change than you are supposed to get, which of course I would say something about.
If keeping extra change is thievery, I’m a very petty thief indeed. On a recent trip to a store with self-checkout lanes, I paid in cash for a few items, grabbed my coins out of the slot, stuck the change in my pocket and headed home. When I got home, I realized I had better than $2.00 in coins in my pocket. I suppose a customer before me forgot to pick up their change - possibly 2 customers, considering the amount. I admit, I did not go back to the store with it. Possibly they could have perused their surveillance tape and id’ed the customer who left the money, but since that customer paid in cash, they probably could not. And the cost of the employee’s time who would have to go through the surveillance tapes was far greater than the amount of the change, anyway.
So, yes, I kept it. And no, I don’t feel any more guilty than I would have if I’d found a quarter on the street.
I’m now on my 6th call to Bank of America insisting that they charge me $2300 due to their inability to do simple accounting in light of two fraud alerts on my account over the past two months. I am doing line item accounting over the phone and explaining simple math to a multinational financial institution worth over 2 TRILLION DOLLARS why I owe them money. They are trying to tell me why I don’t owe them money.
I’ve never had to work so hard in my life to give someone money I owe them. If they fuck it up again, I’m done. On hold right now. 30 minutes and counting spent on this call, probably 2 hours over all 6 calls.