The season of pre-holiday sales is upon us. Having
survived another early morning jaunt to our local shopping mall with the
youngest grandson so he could explore Black Friday day-after-Thanksgiving sales
and mostly, I believe, cavort with other teenagers eager to experience the
frenzy, I can feel the season of sales in my bones.
It's never clear to me how good the Black Friday mall or
online sales actually are, but the frenzy seems to be real. With the season
comes all sorts of online offers meant to entice shoppers to buy more.
A reader, S.L., who is fond of shoes received an email
alert about a limited three-day offer of a free overnight bag from the online
site of a shoe retailer she frequents. "While supplies last," the
offer read, anyone who made a purchase of $39 or more would receive a free bag
by typing the code "FREEBIE" into their online order form.
The only restrictions seemed to be that the bag itself
could not "be returned for cash, credit, or exchange, and is not available
for in-store pick-up." Beyond that, if the purchase of $39 was made and
bags were still available, the overnighter would be hers.
S.L. informed me that $39 is not hard to spend when you
are purchasing shoes, so it seemed a good deal, if she needed shoes. As it
turns out, she didn't need anything at the moment. But she had seen a similar
bag recently and really liked it.
The online site also has a liberal return policy for its
shoes. The purchases can be returned for a full refund through the mail or
brought to the nearest retail outlet. It's a service S.L. had used over the
years when a pair of shoes didn't fit quite right or turned out to be something
other than what she wanted. The returns were always without hassle.
"Would it be wrong to buy $39 worth of stuff knowing
I plan to return it so I could get the bag?" S.L. asks.
Clearly, the intent of the promotion is to get people to
buy more stuff or to buy stuff they might not have intended to buy so they
could receive a valuable prize in return.
But there's nothing unethical about S.L. buying shoes and
returning them and keeping the bag she got for her initial effort. Regardless
of its intentions, the retailer placed no conditions requiring shoppers to keep
the purchases made.
The right thing is for S.L. to make the purchase, see if
the free bags are still available, and then follow the procedures laid out to
return items if she indeed decides to return them.
The retailer might count on many shoppers intending to do
the same thing, only to find that they liked the stuff they ordered to get the
bag so much that they decide to keep it. That's a gamble both S.L. and the
retailer take - that some purchasers might buy stuff they don't really want or
need and end up keeping it and that some buy stuff and return it and keep the
free promotion.
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 answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin
(c) 2018 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
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