It’s wrong. The sale item is not yours. It belongs, until it is sold, to the seller, and to remove it from its place so that it cannot be sold is to appropriate the property for yourself.
That’s all. I can’t see this any other way. There is no way it’s ethical to hide it until you can buy it for less.
This. I figure it doesn’t cost me much and if I can help someone out, why not? But now that I know it’s to scam the sale system, I’ll do it with more enthusiasm!
I wouldn’t hide something, but I wouldn’t point it out either. I’m not being paid to stock shelves. I figure most of the time it is just someone changing their mind about buying something, they know that their spouse or significant other would kill them if they brought home another book when they’ve already got over 100 they haven’t read yet.
Massive chains won’t notice the difference either way. The people cheated by this tactic are other customers.
Maybe hidden, maybe not, none of my business either way, I don’t qualify for the ethics police.
When I was a kid I did this once, but for different reasons. I lived in a very small town with only 1 or 2 stores that sold video games. They had a video game I really wanted for sale, but only had one copy. I hid it behind a stack of other video games (this was before games were routinely kept behind glass). I knew I would have the money to buy it in a few days, so I hid it and hoped no one would look too hard for it in the meantime. It worked! The game was still there when I came to buy it. Woohoo!!
Now that I’m a grown-ass man, I would never do something like that for any reason. Especially not to get a better deal. Seriously, that’s some petty ass bullshit.
I would definitely move it back to where the others were supposed to be. I do that routinely anyway just because I know what a hassle “shelfing” is since I was a grocery store “customer care assistant” or whatever the BS term is for it. So I like to help out by reshelving things properly when I notice they are wrong.
I voted for “I wouldn’t do it, and I’d expose what I found,” but that’s not quite accurate. It would be more accurate to say that I’d feel no ethical compulsion to expose it, but I’d also feel no obligation to go out of my way to do so. I certainly wouldn’t feel like I was tattling if I were to return it to where it belonged or move it somewhere else.
And, for me, even “I wouldn’t do it” is questionable. Upon seeing stuff in the sale rack, I have once or twice moved items to some place less noticeable so that I could consult with my wife about them without risking them being scooped up in the meantime. But in that case, I either wind up buying them, or shortly returning them to where they belong.
Clearly unethical under both a simple economic analysis and a “what would your mother think if she saw you do it” basis. You’re harming other customers who would buy it at a higher price and the store that could sell it at a higher price so you can pay less than it’s worth.
Unless the person that ‘hid the item’ told me they had or I saw them do it I would just assume someone picked up the item then decided they didn’t want it and was too lazy and inconsiderate to return it to where they found it or return it to the above mentioned recovery area.
Yeah, I work in a store, a garden department. Drives me crazy the places you’ll find things hidden.
I was aware of this practice from volunteering at my church’s rummage sale. When I found out that people did that, my first thought was “what pathetic losers”. This is especially true at something like a rummage sale, where even the first-day “regular price” is a huge bargain.
If we saw someone hiding something, we’d ask “Are you buying that?”, and escort them to the cashier table. If we saw something retrieving something from hiding, we’d also escort them back to the cashier table, and charge them the full price for it.
Now, if I saw this happen at a store where I wasn’t actually working, I’d just put it back where it belongs. I know I’m not getting paid to do so, but that just means I won’t go looking for such things. If I happen to notice it even without looking, though, it’s hardly any trouble for me to put it back.
So, no votes for “I’d move it to a new hidden location, and while buying my new game on sale, I’d scope out the old location to see if I could pick up some schadenfreude from my disappointed rival”?