Is it wrong for a store to keep the change because of its policy?

Is it OK for a merchant not to return change to a customer by claiming: “We don’t do change?” And chalking it up to a coin shortage.

There’s a growing perception that there is a “coin shortage” in the United States. But the Federal Reserve assures people that there’s no shortage, but instead a problem with the circulation of coins. In other words, the coins are out there, but apparently they are just not getting into the hands of merchants seeking to make change for a customers’ purchases.

Whether it’s a shortage or a problem, is it OK for a merchant to expect customers to use a credit card or use exact change if they pay in cash, or forego their change if they don’t do either?

Recently, a neighborhood social media site in the Northeast lit up after a user posted about his experience at a local package store, which is a euphemism for a liquor stores still used in some parts of the country. The poster was incensed after his purchase of wine was rung up and the cashier bagged it and said, “Thanks, you’re all set.” When pressed, the cashier explained the store doesn’t do change because of the “coin shortage.” The poster was incensed and expressed dissatisfaction to the cashier. She left and told her spouse about what happened. The spouse returned to the store later that week, had words with the owner who ultimately gave him the change along with a snarky comment about being sorry for all the pennies he had been shorted over the years.

What’s the right thing here? Is it right for the customer to expect change on a cash purchase? Or is it OK for a merchant to enact a no-change policy?

As might be expected, the responders to the post had all sorts of suggestions about how to get back at the merchant: Pay entirely in pennies! Pay just short of what’s owed and tell them you’ll give them the rest when the shortage is over! Others scolded the poster for whining about being shorted a few cents. Another suggested the poster do something positive like suggesting the merchant start an extra change plate so customers can take what they need and leave what they want for others to use.

Lawyers will likely have an opinion on the legality of not providing change, but as I’ve written many times, I am neither a lawyer nor a psychotherapist nor a neighborhood website administrator.

The right thing if the merchant truly is having an issue getting hold of enough available change is to post clearly that the store has an exact change policy. The cashier should be instructed to repeat that policy before an order is rung up if for some reason the customers don’t see the postings. Customers can then decide if they want to make the purchase or not. But all of this should happen before the purchase is made, not after.

Customers don’t have to like the policy. But then they don’t have to continue shopping at any store where exact change is required if they don’t want to.

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) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Is it ok to report a neighbor anonymously?

Should we report our neighbors who violate city-mandated bans on watering our yards?

I’ve received variations on that question over the years as various parts of the country face water shortages and try to limit water usage. About a year ago a reader wondered if the town was responsible for following up on such mandates by citing residents who violated the ban. My answer was “yes.” If a municipality wants a ban to have real effect, it should enforce the ban. Otherwise, it should simply issue an advisory and leave it up to residents to decide whether to be compliant.

More recently, an email arrived from a reader we’re calling Barry. Barry lives in northern California where he writes that they are under a strict rule imposed by the city to conserve water. These rules include “no waste in irrigating our yards,” Barry writes. “Well, one of our neighbors is just ignoring this dictate and there is water covering the sidewalk and going down the storm drains almost every morning.”

Barry wants to report his neighbor to the city but doesn’t want to attach his name to the complaint.

“Should I ask the city to allow anonymous tips?” Barry asks. “I don’t want to cause trouble, I just want all of us who do conserve water to get a fair shake from those who waste it.”

Barry’s desire that all of his neighbors adhere to the watering ban seems valid. The goal of conserving water during a drought might be a bit of a better reason than making sure that if Barry has to do it everyone should, but a desire for fairness doesn’t seem a bad motivation either.

In many cases, I’m not a huge fan of anonymity, but there are times when it seems perfectly acceptable. If Barry’s neighbor is indeed violating the terms of the lawn-watering ban, it seems fine for him to want to have the town address the issue without attaching his name to the complaint. Ideally, the town would monitor neighborhoods to ensure residents are complying, but that doesn’t seem to be happening, likely because the town doesn’t have the resources to do so.

In Boston, we have access to a 311 app that allows residents to report everything from missed trash pickup and potholes to cars blocking driveways and sloppy snow removal. The 311 app allows a user to check off “anonymous” as an option.

If Barry’s hometown doesn’t have a similar app, it seems reasonable for him to call either town hall or the water department to inquire whether it is possible to make an anonymous report about someone appearing to violate the lawn-watering ban. If town officials are serious about the efforts to conserve water, they should follow-up on all such reports, even if they are anonymous.

The right thing, of course, is for Barry’s neighbor to adhere to the town ordinance unless it turns out that he has a private well he’s using that isn’t covered by the town’s regulation. If the neighbor isn’t doing the right thing, then Barry has every right to alert the authorities.

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) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Are there some books we shouldn't sell?

What “ethical requirements” do retailers and resellers have when it comes to what they sell?

That’s the question a reader I’m calling Nell asked me recently for a particularly personal reason.

Nell is a longtime bookseller. At her bookstore job, she tells me she has no trouble stocking and selling books like Mein Kampf by Adolph Hitler. Or, she writes, “carrying books that sincerely claim the Earth is flat.” She figures that there are any number of reasons a person might want to read this kind of book.

But as a side hustle, with the full knowledge of her bookstore’s owner, she sells used books online. Recently, at a thrift store, she found a used copy of an autobiography by a racist military man who, among other things, “bragged about his military death count.” She paid $1 for the book. Nell discovered that the author died decades ago, his book is now out of print, and it often commands about $100 when it appears.

“I wouldn’t have a huge problem selling his autobiography for the $100 it sells for used,” she write, “because…there could be any number of reasons someone would buy it.”

But Nell notes that the copy she found was signed by the author. She figures that signature would more than double the price it might sell for.

“Is it ethical for me to profit from the resale of this book?” she asks. She points out that she didn’t publish it and just “found a copy in the wild.” The website she uses allows her to send a portion of the sale price to a charity. If she were to sell this book she indicates she would give a percentage of the sales price to a local food bank.

“But I find myself uneasy about this distasteful book and wonder if it would be more ethical to destroy it, since any buyer who would pay double would likely be buying the book largely for the prestige of the author’s signature.”

Whenever questions like this arrive, I am reminded of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, a Love Story where a Polish peasant who survived the Holocaust is shocked to discover there are books being written about Hitler and asks: “They write books about such swine?”

They do and still do and Nell has already worked through the pros and cons of selling such items both at the bookstore where she works and in her online store. She is correct that there could be many reasons someone would want to buy such a book. Nell doesn’t screen her customers to find out what reason they have for buying books from her. That the book she found at the thrift store happens to be signed and might garner more money than an unsigned book doesn’t change her calculation that she has no idea why someone would want to buy any particular book.

The right thing is to decide if she is indeed as fine as she says she is about selling any book to any person who might want to buy it. If she determines that she isn’t, then that would require her to rethink what she’s willing to sell. If she holds to her belief that she has no problem selling such books, she should go ahead and sell it.

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) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

When it's important to call others out on comments

Is it always OK not to say when you are thinking when someone is talking to you?

In a conversation with a reader we’re calling Tim, the topic of how to keep from prolonging conversations you don’t particularly want to be having came up. Tim was asking if it had been wrong when speaking with an old friend on the telephone that he found himself really wanting the conversation to end. Instead of reacting fully to anything the friend was saying, Tim would simply utter, “Oh” or “Yup” or “OK.” Fearing that if he said anything more substantial it would prolong the phone call, Tim chose not to and, as he had hoped, he was able to extract himself from the call in relative short order.

I told Tim that there was nothing wrong with the impulse he had. While it might have been more direct for Tim to simply tell his friend he needed to get off the phone, I can understand that Tim didn’t want to appear rude.

As chance would have it, I told Tim that I had found myself in a similar situation recently. An old acquaintance I hadn’t heard from in years and really don’t know well, called my office phone that doesn’t ring all that often. After it became clear that the caller wanted to gripe about a shared acquaintance and seemed mostly to want me to agree with his take, I found myself simply wanting to get off the call. (The thought crossed my mind that I could be home having a nice piece of fish.) I neither agreed or disagreed with him, hoping the conversation would end. Eventually, I politely told him I had to go which happened to be the truth.

But in the course of the conversation, the caller made a comment that struck me as racist followed with the sentence: “And you know I’m the least racist person you know.”

His response reinforced for me that there are times that it’s not always OK to ignore what someone is saying simply because you would rather be doing something else.

Generally, if you find yourself having to follow-up a statement you make with a comment that you are not saying something racist or that you are not a racist, it’s a good signal that what you just said is indeed likely racist and that by virtue of the fact that you called attention to it in that manner you know perfectly well that what you just said was racist.

I did respond by telling the old acquaintance precisely that. He did not try to defend his comment and we moved on, but he knew where I stood. The conversation ended shortly after.

There are times when such incidents arise and I regret afterward when I don’t find an opportunity or the courage to call people out. But the right thing is to confront people when they say something to you that is so objectionable that to let it stand might be perceived as condoning the sentiment. And because calling racists out on racist comments or behavior is the right thing to do.

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) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Stop spreading the fake news

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus, the king of Ephyra, twice was able to cheat death. But as his punishment he was sentenced for eternity to roll a large boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down the hill as he reached the top. Fighting off those who continue to insist on spreading fake news among friends and family on social media and via email seems downright Sisyphean.

I’m not talking about the spread of fake news on broadcast media, though that continues to abound at a damaging pace. I’m talking about the memes and emails and assorted bric-a-brac littering our feeds and inboxes with regularity. The Sisyphean aspect is that often when it seems like the fakeness of an item has been beaten down, it thrusts its way back.

I won’t repeat the details of the email I just received from an old friend who was forwarding it on from someone who likely had already sent it on to dozens of others. Suffice it to say, it included references to a former presidential candidate, a billionaire philanthropist, and a handful of other regular victims of malicious fakery. What’s more, it’s almost word for word the same text that made the rounds about a year ago that was decidedly debunked by a Reuters Fact Check team.

The email sender regularly forwards emails he receives that he finds funny or interesting or provocative. He never includes a note. Just forwarded stuff that occasionally is distasteful or just an annoying spread of fake facts. If he posted it to social media, the site might flag it. When it’s spread as email, it’s up to the recipients to decide first whether to read it, second whether to believe it, third whether to check it out, and finally whether to call him on the bunk he is spreading with abandon. It’s the last of these steps I’m concerned with here. What’s the best response, if any, after receiving emails such as these?

It would take the least amount of work to simply ignore the message. Granted even if I respond by calling out the fakery, it’s unclear if that would stop him from continuing to spread it around. But doing nothing in response seems wrong. Taking the stance that my one email can’t fix the larger problem is like deciding to throw your hands up at making any small effort to do the right thing when you know your actions are unlikely to provide an immediate fix.

Does it really take that much time to call people on their spreading of fake news? After receiving the email, it took less than a minute to copy and paste it into an internet search and find the Reuters article debunking it. It took even less time than to respond with a link to the article and the sentence: “What you sent is factually incorrect.”

In spite of it feeling like that fabricated boulder is going to come rolling right back at me at some point, the right thing is to embrace the concept of doing the right thing even when it feels Sisyphean to do so.

And to my emailing friend: Knock it off. That goes for my readers’ fake-news-spreading friends too. Just tell them to knock it off.

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) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.