Ethical, yes, but different people feel differently about such things. How you feel about something may guide you more than the ethics of the situation. Of course, being unethical makes most (and unfortunately not all) people feel bad.
E.g., a office supply store had ads for a stack of CDRs for free after rebates. I go in, they don’t have any in stock, but are offering a substitute. I ask “But what about the rebate on the substitute?” and their solution was to give it to me. No sales tax, no rebate forms, no waiting for check that might not come. I presumably could have gone back several times that week and gotten more. But I thought about how that would deprive someone else of a little bit of joy and said “What the hey, let someone else have some fun too.”
I feel better doing that. That’s what counts for me.
My view is similar to Mangtout’s. Snooze, you lose. But even though I’m somewhat of an asshole, I still feel a bit of guilt that maybe someone lower on cash than myself might really want/need this super special. As much as I dislike people as a whole, I do have a bit of a heart. That still doesn’t stop me (most times) from buying most, if not all, of the 75% off discontinued, items that I come across as long as I need them myself.
That said, buy what you can get your hands on. You aren’t doing anything wrong.
I don’t know if this is actually the ethical viewpoint but…
If you were waiting in line to pay, and someone came up to you and complained to you that you emptied the shelves, would you feel bad about it? If it wasn’t just a hypothetical aggrieved person, but an actual flesh-and-blood one?
It annoys me, but it’s ethical. It just seems like a bratty kid hording all the cake for himself at a birthday to me.
And if someone just scooped up all the sale items in front of me as I was waiting my turn to get near the display, I’d definitely have something to say.
Clearance items I see as more of a free-for-all. But when some asshat takes all the available sale items in the supermarket, that’s just lame. Luckily, most have limits on the amount of items you can purchase at that sale price now.
I’d probably be annoyed when I reached the empty shelf, but hey, them’s the breaks. It’s no one else’s responsibility to make sure that what I want is still there by the time I get around to going to the store.
Absolutely ethical. You don’t even know if someone else would have ended up buying the clearance items you left behind, so by leaving them you might just be hurting both yourself and the store.
If you have the means and patience to liquidate the goods in question, I encourage you to do so. In fact, you could go a step further: ask for a manager and quote a price for the whole display. This happens more than you might think, and ridiculously low offers are usually accepted without negotiation. The store is usually just trying to get the goods “off the books”.
If you feel guilty, and in this particular instance I don’t think you should, send me a cheque.