What Would You Do To Get a Deal?
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Once in a while, usually near Christmas time, I’ll hear a terrible story on my local news. It usually begins the same way… there was a great sample sale, or a door buster, or a limited amount of X item sold at some great price. And it usually ends the same way too… video footage of a crazy old woman with wild eyes beating another with her purse as she desperately tries to grab a scarf; or fathers in the toy aisle each grabbing on side of a box and tugging like a couple of dogs who got ahold of a sock in their teeth.
These people are adults, and yet when it comes to getting ahold of some great bargain, the lose all sense of morality and polite behavior and we’re reverted back to nature’s law. This got me to thinking… how far would you go to get a deal and is it ok to throw our ethics out the window in order to do so.
I read a lot of different deal forums, and some of the posts that get the most attention are those which deal with a price mistake. The threads are flooded as people order $499.00 computers accidentally marked for $99 or something along those lines. Some people post boasting of “ordering 50 of these things!” (although those same people usually get jumped on by the moralists who are only ordering 1 or 2 or 4 for several close friends.) I jump on these deals too, even going so far as to pay for overnight shipping to increase my odds of profiting from someone else’s error. It is easy to justify this- the company was at fault, it is their mistake and they should face the consequences. However, what about the tired IT person who made the mistake in posting the price. What if his baby was up all night with the flu, or he was worried about a sick friend; and now he gets fired because one person found this mistake and posted it for thousands of others to take advantage of.
If you’re ok with jumping on a price mistake, what about using a coupon that you know is coded wrong? In some circles, there’s a lot of buzz about a certain high valued Proctor & Gamble Coupon that is incorrectly coded to work on any P&G item. Is it OK to use this coupon, to try to sneak it by at the self-checkout? After all, if you’re doing this at a big store and you’re going to a self checkout, no one really gets hurt. Someone is probably buying the item anyway, so the manufacturer will probably still get reimbursed. But… what if the self checkout manager gets into trouble? Or, even if no one gets into trouble and it all goes through fine and you happily come home clutching your P&G product; what happened to the idea that ethics is what we do when no one is looking?
I’m not trying to judge, and I know that I’ve been guilty a time or two of jumping in on an incorrectly coded coupon, or perhaps not necessarily reading all the questions when I fill out an internet survey, or any number of other things that I know on some level are “wrong.” My point though, is that we all have to draw our own line somewhere, and that perhaps we should all take a minute and think about exactly where we want to draw that line in the sand. And when we do, we need to remember that someone (our children, God, the little voice in our head?) is watching, and that maybe in the long run the quest to get this deal may cost us more in other ways
