While I can certainly see how taking advantage of a mom & pop grocery that mislabeled their beef prices and lost $500 doing so hurts them more than a megacorp I am not sure how we write a law or determine ethics based on some arbitrary line of the have and have-nots.
Where did we do this?
I’ll drop this, since you’ve been ignoring me. But Jeff Bezos walks into a mom/pop store and sees a mislabelled item. Moral? Different that the OP’s story? How/wehere do we draw the lines, and should we?
How do we know the grocery store in the story is a megacorporation and not a regional entity? Two of the major chains near me are local, and both have good reputations for treating their employees and customers decently.
Fwiw, i reject your hypothesis that it’s okay to steal from the rich. But my quibble here is that i don’t think we even know the status of the store here.
You seem to be close to conceding that the actions of this customer could not be justified in an ideal society, but are justified only by worse acts committed by corporations. That’s a defensible moral framework even if I don’t agree with it here, but then why were you so resistant to what I said all along:
As for this:
Well, all I can say is that this is entirely in your imagination. I don’t think anybody in this thread has defended big corporations. To the contrary, I’m interested in effective measures against corporations, policies that do not require us to recalibrate our entire morality, and not random stealing that may have unforeseen consequences that penalize employees and other customers.
You may have tried to draw a distinction here, but others have noted the difficulty about where exactly you draw the line about who you can ethically steal from.
Why wouldn’t it be? I can see why in the situation in the OP where the price is an honest mistake, you can argue it’s unethical to take advantage of that. I wouldn’t want people taking advantage of my honest mistakes.
But a generous return policy is entirely an intentional decision by the owner. As such, it’s their responsibility to have already considered and factored in any downsides. They know that some people might risk light usage before returning something, just like places that sell you on free trials know you might cancel before the paid portion begins.
Sure, maybe the calculations are off, and too many people will take advantage. That’s a reason to change the policy. But, as long as they chose to allow well-worn products to be returned, the customer has every right to use that policy. The consequences of that are the seller’s responsibility, since they’re the ones who implemented the policy.
For it to be “taking advantage,” I’d require there be some sort of deception or lie. Maybe they hide how “well-used” the items are, or lie about something having been a problem from day 1. Then that’s immoral.
But if you have a return policy that allows you to return well-used items, then what could have possibly been the intent other than allowing the customer to use those items?
Obviously the intent is not for everyone to get free use of brand new ski gear for three months, then return it for a full refund even though there is nothing wrong with it. How is that a workable business model? Who would ever buy ski gear again?
You are right that a too-generous return policy is stupid on the part of a corporation, because in reality a minority of people are always unethical assholes. But I don’t see how this demonstrates that those people are not unethical assholes who make life difficult for everyone. I like no-hassle return policies to the extent that they make life easier for me and other honest people who don’t abuse them, but in fact I wish companies would be more stringent because I know that abusers of these policies mean that prices are forced higher. All non-assholes are inconvenienced when a company is forced to accept that trusting people to behave reasonably is unworkable.
I’m a big fan of Amazon’s profiling of customers, where they record the return behavior of individual customers over time, and “trust” them accordingly. This is only necessary because some people are unethical assholes.
That seems pretty obvious to me. It’s because he doesn’t grant that the action in question is a form of theft. That, because the store actually marked the price of the items as given, they are the ones responsible for any loss, not the customer.
My counterargument is what I said before: I would not want someone taking advantage of me making a minor mistake. But that’s where I can see factoring in the fact that I am an individual who might be severely harmed by someone taking advantage of my mistake, while this megacorp is unlikely to face harm. Would I mind if someone took advantage of a mistake that cost me a proportionate amount of my income? Probably not.
Most of the counterargument seem to say that some level of taking advantage of the mistake would be okay, but that this guy went too far. That seems a fair argument to me.
That’s more or less corporate policy where I work - if the lower price is our mistake the customer gets the lower price, but there is expectation that the staff will correct this ASAP.
Not much different at all.
Although a day or two before the “sell date” we tend to discount the milk and dairy to get it to sell (rather than be a loss). Which is an effective tactic.
^ This. As long as you don’t cause damage and/or leave a mess we really don’t care. Well, sure, we’d prefer you’d buy the stuff that’s going to expire sooner first, but since none of us in our personal lives do that we don’t expect you to do so, either.
…and that’s why we discount the ones with only a day or two of shelf life left. For some people - those for whom money is an over-riding concern and/or will consume it quickly - that’s sufficient incentive for them to take the older ones first. Which solves a potential problem for the store and makes those customers happy.
In the state in which this occurred - Michigan - it is incorrect to say the store agreed to this. They are compelled to this by law, not by choice. It may not be theft but it sure seems like the customer took advantage of the situation.
No, was compelled by law. That’s not the same thing at all as “agreeing” to anything. Just ask anyone who received a traffic violation ticket, was fined for not keeping their lawn to local HOA standards, or any of a myriad other ways that one can be compelled by law to give something up.
My understanding of the Michigan law - based on having lived in Michigan for 12 years, as well as working for a company headquartered in Michigan and, for consistency/simplicity’s sake basing most of the operations on Michigan laws/rules/etc. - is that NO, THERE IS NO LEEWAY HERE. The manager CAN NOT make an exception to the law without putting the corporation at risk. At my own store we have had to take losses in the hundreds of dollars from that sort of pricing mistake. If store management attempts to circumvent that policy they can be disciplined. I don’t know if that would extend to firing (I’m not management) but certainly the managers where I work do not have any discretion in these matters. I do know that any action taken by an employee that puts the corporation into an area of legal risk/liability is one of the quicker ways to get fired from where I work. The corporation, and its lawyers, take this sort of think surprisingly seriously.
Does my employer have sufficient funds to cover the losses for one instance of mis-priced steaks? Yep, they do. But they don’t stay in business by being stupid, either. If the store does not make money it does not stay open and both employees and customers lose.
You don’t have to like big corporations, but the notion that their pockets are infinitely deep and their tolerance of bleeding money is unlimited is misguided.
Part of running efficiently is the store doing whatever it can to get out of honoring legalistic loopholes.
So… you’re advocating one law for the wealthy and a different law for the poor? Am I understanding that correctly?
You wouldn’t object if someone ripped you off for $10 in a way that gave you no easy recourse? You might not sue them, because it isn’t worth the hassle. But to say that you wouldn’t mind is obviously not correct.
In any event, how much you pragmatically care doesn’t determine the morality of the actions of the person ripping you off, does it? Nor does it speak to possible implications for society if we all just decided it was okay to rip people off for modest amounts at every opportunity when we thought we could get away with it.
Immoral? Probably.
Asshole? I don’t care about the injury to the corporation or management. But his actions could have harmed the workers responsible for printing and applying the price labels. He should have thought about that, especially given that he did not need this quantity of meat, especially given that the “mistake” was not harmful to him, and especially given that he was aware of this mistake prior to purchase. He was selfish, inconsiderate, and deceitful.
Theft? Absolutely not. That’s a word with a specific legal definition. If this were theft, then he’d have been charged, and the store didn’t press charges. It’s a bad law, and it isn’t illegal to obey a bad law, hence it’s not theft.
In saying that this was theft, quite obviously nobody is asserting that it was technically theft under the law. The fact that a word has a technical legal definition does not mean that this is the only possible meaning of the word. A tomato is not always a fruit, and I don’t think we need to invent another word for the perfectly intuitive concept of “taking property without the owner’s uncoerced agreement” just because there are sometimes legal loopholes that allow you to do this. For example:
- Legally, it’s not stealing. Full stop.
- Morally, it’s only stealing if you take it for granted that the wealthy have a right, a moral right, to remain wealthy even in spite of their own negligence.
Just how wealthy do you have to be for this to apply, and relative to whom? May I compare your standard of living to a villager in Somalia, say?
Where is the line drawn for this? How much money is too much money?
In which case, that’s an action of the state legislature (albeit one I happen to support), not the customer, and it only heightens the negligence of the store for failing to accurately price its wares.
But, to be clear, I am less convinced that the store had no choice where the mistake was obvious and even the customer recognized it. I’m not a lawyer, but then again… neither are you.
If I have offered to sell something to a Somalian villager, and they have noticed an error in my pricing scheme and cunningly taken advantage of it… then yes you may.
Do you think that this is really a good way to help Somalians? Why should these fortuitous circumstances for one sneaky Somalian be required for you to help, and why should only one Somalian get the lucky break? Wouldn’t it be better for you to just run your business consistently and equally for all customers, and donate money to a Somalian charity? Or better yet, for the government to increase everyone’s taxes slightly, and provide a lot more money in international aid to the entire country?
No. No I don’t. Just like I don’t think opportunistic wealth redistribution is a good system either. But you’re treating me unfairly here. You’re acting as if I want the exact same system you have in your head (whatever we have right now I guess?) but just with opportunistic “self help.” I don’t want that. I want a more just system of government, a more just economy, and a more just distribution of opportunity and wealth.
But we don’t have that system now. In the meantime, and as I said, I’ll take what I can get.
Emotionally, I get the “big corporation won’t notice” stance, and have certainly taken that position when choosing my own actions on occasion.
However, I think that if I were to be trying to stick to a coherent ethical code, I have to admit that in almost all cases my knowledge about the impacts of my actions is incomplete. I maybe can say that my taking advantage of some unforeseen error or loophole is meaningless to the company, but I really don’t know its impct on the clerk working today, or the regional manager, or whatever.
So, for me, “big company, don’t care” is a self-serving excuse, and not a fact-based analysis.
Also, I don’t think the REI return policy is a good analogy to the OP. The fact that a “we take all returns for any reason whatsoever” policy only makes business sense when most people do not take advantage of it does not mean that doing the thing the store told me I could do is unethical. In fact, I’m already paying a premium to support that return policy, and presumably some people are constantly working out what that premium should be based on sales and returns numbers.
I didn’t mean to criticize your noble intent. All I’m saying is that allowing one sneaky Somalian to cheat you isn’t a good way to help Somalia. And that, by analogy, problematic behavior by corporations should be addressed by public policy - consistent regulation and fair taxation - not by sneaky individuals randomly exploiting legal loopholes to steal from them.