If you receive an item you didn’t order, what do you do?

What’s the right thing to do when you get something you haven’t ordered from Amazon.com?

A few weeks before Christmas, a reader we’re calling Jane received an email alert that a package she had ordered from Amazon had arrived. A photo accompanying the package showed her goods resting safely on her front stoop. Jane was relieved that a small gift she had ordered for her husband had arrived in time for her to wrap it, place it under their tree, and have it waiting for him on Christmas morning.

The gift was a small scratch-off card that allowed users to scratch off specific places they had visited. Jane had ordered one 5-by-7 card and had paid $15.99 for it. But when Jane opened the package, she found that Amazon had shipped her 30 shrink-wrapped cards instead of one. Jane re-checked her original order and bill to make sure she hadn’t ordered more than one card. She hadn’t, and she had no intention of keeping items she hadn’t ordered or paid for.

Jane noticed on the Amazon page that the item was made by a small business that partnered with Amazon. The website encouraged prospective buyers to support these small businesses. Jane was concerned that the owners of the small business that made the cards would lose potential sales on 29 cards that were errantly sent to Jane.

Her past experience with Amazon led her to believe that finding an actual human being to deal with rather than a series of auto-responses to calls or emails could prove challenging. Rather than contact Amazon, Jane looked up the customer service email from the card company’s website. She wrote the company a note explaining what happened. While she had figured that a response from them would be swift, she didn’t anticipate just how swift. Within hours she heard from the company, thanking her for her honesty and her offer to return the items if they told her how. The company told her to keep five of the cards and to provide them with her Venmo account information so they could send her $8 for any return shipping costs.

Jane was touched by the offer. She returned 25 of the cards, gave one to her husband, three to a friend who traveled with her family to similar places, and kept one for herself. She paid for her own postage. Once the company received the cards, they thanked her again for her honesty.

When you receive something you didn’t order or are undercharged for something you’ve purchased, the right thing is to try to correct that wrong. There’s no need to have that correction end up costing you more than the item itself, but Jane figured the $8 was more than offset by the company’s offer to keep four cards, even though she hadn’t intended to spend money on them.

Some readers may argue that Jane should have contacted Amazon directly rather than taking action that might better ensure the small business wouldn’t be out of pocket for the errant shipment. Others might point out that that small business was in a better position to do whatever might be necessary to make good with its partner Amazon. Jane’s actions, however, suggest there are still people who will to try to do the right thing when no one is looking.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Looking back at another year of doing The Right Thing

A year ago, at the end of 2023, after looking at the analytics for the website where The Right Thing weekly column gets posted after it has run in publications that carry it, it was clear that readers were most drawn to columns that touched on leaving jobs gracefully, maintaining privacy after death, showing gratitude in tough times and learning how to support children without doing their work for them.

In 2024, the top five columns focused on being an engaged citizen, companies that prop up bad behavior in advertisements, learning to lose gracefully, not allowing pretension to get in the way of our message and whether companies are obligated to honor commitments even if they were made in jest.

The fifth-most viewed column, “Fly me to the moon,” ran in late October. I wrote it shortly after a billionaire financed Elon Musk’s Polaris Dawn spaceflight for roughly $200 million. I reminisced about signing up for a “First Moon Flight Club” sponsored by Pan American Airways in the late 1960s. Pan Am is long gone as a company, but I argued that even if this was a marketing gimmick, if the company were still around and actually offering trips to the moon, it would do well to see if those who signed up were interested. Granted, few of us would be able to foot the bill. Nevertheless, it would be nice to be asked.

An August column, “Humor can be a funny thing,” was written in response to a series of television advertisements run by a national mattress company. The ads featured people behaving badly being asked how they slept at night. The response was always that they slept on one of the company’s mattresses. That the ads seemed to suggest that you too could behave badly if only you used our product struck me as an odd marketing strategy.

Using a line from Steely Dan about wanting a name when we lose, an October column, “How we lose can define us,” concluded that how we behave when we lose can go a long way toward sending a message about our character.

In September, I wrote in “Do too many signature credentials smack of pretension?” about how those who use too many initials and affiliations in their email signatures might come off as trying too hard to appear more impressive than they need to. It was best, I argued, not to let such things risk getting in the way of the message you were trying to convey.

Finally, by far the most viewed Right Thing column of the year was early November’s “Don’t get angry. Get to work.” I argued in the column that anger in response to some effort not going the way we wanted too often sapped our energy and distracted us from continuing to focus on other ways to achieve our goals. “If we were truly concerned about a cause, that cause doesn’t disappear because we didn’t get our way,” I wrote. “Rather than stew in anger or regret, the right thing seems to be to double down on any efforts to engage in whatever work is needed to set things straight.”

Thank you for continuing to email your questions, stories and reactions to The Right Thing column. May your years continue to be full of doing the right thing while surrounded by those who choose to do the same.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

If you stain a pair of jeans before you check out, must you buy them?

How honest should you be when returning product to store shelves?

A reader we’re calling Davis is particular about the type of denim jeans he wears, both brand and style. He keeps a lookout when they become available at the membership warehouse club to which he belongs since the price is much better than elsewhere.

A challenge Davis has is that the size jeans he wears, waist and inside leg length, is rarely as available as other sizes. He figures that he either has unusual measurements or one of the most common measurements. Whatever the reason, Davis tries to grab a pair of his favorite jeans whenever he finds them at a good price. Typically, by the time this happens the jeans he does own either have holes in the knees or splattered paint or grease embedded in the denim.

But on a recent trip to his warehouse club, large stacks of Davis’ favorite jeans were piled up on counters in the center of the store. Davis parked his shopping cart at the end of the counter, ransacked his way through the hundreds of pairs of jeans to see if they had his size. He grabbed the two pair of jeans in his size that were in the denim piles.

Pleased with his find, Davis went about his shopping. He picked up a rotisserie chicken, a bag of coffee beans, some navel oranges, and a container of strawberries, among other things. When he got to the line queued up for the cash registers, Davis noticed that the strawberries had been sitting on top of the jeans and had left what looked to be a stain on them.

Now, Davis was faced with a decision. Should he buy the jeans and hope to get the stain out? Should he pull out of line and go back to toss the jeans onto the pile where he found them? Or should he go to the customer service counter at the front of the store and hand the jeans over to them explaining what happened?

Two of these options could have been a right thing to do. Davis could have purchased the jeans and hoped for the best in removing the stain. Or he could have handed the jeans over to the customer service desk or to the cashier at the cash register and explained what happened. Returning them with a stain to the pile of goods may have been the quickest remedy, but that chanced that an unsuspecting customer might purchase them without noticing the strawberry blemish.

If Davis didn’t want to deal with getting the stain out of the jeans, then the right thing would have been to turn them over to someone at the store who could make the decision about what to do with them. Davis shouldn’t feel guilty if he chose not to buy the jeans even though he was the one who wasn’t careful about where the strawberries were placed in his cart. He should be no more responsible for this error of judgment than he would be had he knocked over a jar of olives. Next time the jeans become available, however, Davis would be wise to be more careful about his cart produce placement.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Should we always vote for our friends?

Is it OK to vote for your friends or yourself even if you believe someone else is a better choice?

When I was in graduate school and living in graduate housing, the choice of who would serve as dorm proctor the following academic year was left to the vote of the current dorm residents. The dorm proctor was mostly charged with keeping track of keys and being the direct line of contact for the dean of students whenever an issue arose. The main attraction was that the proctor didn’t have to pay for his or her room for the academic year.

While there were no formal campaigns for the position, there were always several people vying for the position. In trying to weigh who would do the job the best, a friend of mine held firm that the choice was obvious: “You always vote for your friends.”

I was reminded of her admonition when I received an email from Phil Clutts, a long-time reader of the column from North Carolina. Phil had received a notification that a caption he had written for the New Yorker cartoon caption contest was accepted as a finalist and was among the three submitted captions to a blank cartoon that readers would choose as the best for the week.

“I can vote for myself, as can others whom I have encouraged to vote,” wrote Phil. “What if I or the others think that one (or both) of the competing captions is funnier than mine? Can I/we ethically vote for mine?”

Humor, as I’ve written here before, can be a funny thing. If Phil indeed thought his caption was simply awful, he likely shouldn’t have submitted it and tried a little harder. But if his was equally strong, as the screeners at the New Yorker seemed to think it was, then he might ask himself if he simply enjoyed the other entries a bit more because they were new to him. He had likely read and re-read his entry many times before submitting it, so beyond the excitement of learning it was chosen as a finalist, could it be that he was unsure if it was the best of the three simply because it was the most familiar?

I don’t believe Phil should have any qualms about voting for his own work and encouraging others to do so as well. Ultimately, the right thing is to let his friends know about his good news, encourage them to consider his entry, but recognize they might or might not vote for his comedic pearls.

Which brings me to my friend’s admonition that you always vote for your friends. In principle, I understood her reasoning since I was in the running for dorm proctor and I believed it was her way of telling me I had her vote. Of course, she might have been telling me that she was going to vote for another of her friends who might be running. I’ll never know, but unless she believed someone was woefully unqualified to do the job, she was free to use whatever criteria she chose to decide her vote.

I ended up being chosen to serve as dorm proctor. And it turns out Phil won that week’s caption contest with or without his own and his friends’ vote. Nicely done, Mr. Clutts.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2024 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Listening before interrupting may yield better understanding

Is it wrong to correct someone if you’re not certain they’re wrong?

In the early 1970s, when I was a sophomore in high school, I was enrolled in a class called “PSSC Physics.” The other students in the class were seniors with far more science and math classes under their belt than I had. I never knew what the PSSC stood for until about a week ago when I looked it up and found that it was an acronym for the Physical Science Study Committee, a group that grew out of a 1956 conference whose mission it was to produce curriculum for high school physics classes.

I recall few things about the course. I do remember that we had regular standardized tests that were used to measure our progress throughout the term. I remember heavy use of steel ball bearings. There was also a lot of discussion about electricity and currents. But mostly I remember being in way over my head and rarely having a clear grasp of the material. On the rare occasion when I did understand something, or at least thought I understood it, a wave of momentary confidence washed over me.

On one such occasion when I was absolutely certain I knew what was going on, I interrupted our teacher, Mr. Wittman, mid-sentence in his lecture and blurted out, “That’s wrong.” Mr. Wittman was an institution at my high school – older, demanding, revered and not to be messed with. Upon my interruption, without hesitation, he stared me down and responded: “You’re interrupting me to tell me I’m wrong.”

And then he proceeded to lay out how I had been rude in interrupting him, and also laid out clearly in excruciating detail how I was wrong about him being wrong. He ended by looking directly at me from behind the lab table at the front of the room and asked: “Are we clear now?”

I did not ask for clarification on whether he wondered if I was clear on the material or clear about how rude I’d been. I suspect he was referencing both.

That experience with Mr. Wittman has never left me. There have been dozens of incidents since where I have seen others interrupt speakers to correct them before giving them a chance to complete a sentence. It’s been all too common an occurrence to hear someone choose to correct rather than to ask a question or two to make sure they understood what was being discussed. There is a rush to be seen as right and someone else wrong instead of a patience to make sure we are.

Students should question their instructors if they need clarity on a topic. They have every right to challenge what’s being presented if they believe they have something to offer that can advance the discussion.

But the right thing is to make sure we listen to others, whether in a classroom or workplace setting or in life, before we rush to correct. Not just because it’s rude, but because by listening closely we might gain a clearer understanding of what someone is trying to say and it might help us sharpen out own views that may differ from the presenter’s

Mr. Wittman never seemed to hold my interruption against me, and I was able to pass his class. But please don’t quiz me on physics.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin. 

(c) 2024 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.