Daughter and dad showdown at the Golden Corral

“Dad, which one’s your favorite?” a daughter asks her father as they and her brother are eating chicken in a Golden Corral commercial.

“I’m going to go with Josh,” the dad quickly responds. To which Josh quips, “Yes,” as he pulls down his fist in a signal of victory.

“I’m sorry. What?” the daughters asks. “I was talking about the types of chicken.”

“C’mon, you know I love all my chickens,” the dad responds, apparently putting more thought into the feelings of his chickens than he does his kids. There appears to be at least one more female child at the table who presumably is not the father’s favorite either.

As advertisements go, it’s not the most offensive ad ever run. But it does seem an odd choice for a restaurant that bills itself as having a mission of delivering “a pleasurable dining experience for families across America.” Clearly, the daughter in the ad who, unlike Josh, doesn’t even have a name, may not have found the experience so pleasurable.

Golden Corral offers buffet-style meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I cannot vouch for the quality of the food since I have never eaten in one of its restaurants. The closest one to me is 48.9 miles north of me in a different state, according to the company’s website location finder.

But the company does appear to be community-minded, based on some of its ongoing efforts. It has an annual military appreciation night, where it provides free meals to active and retired members of the military. It sponsors Camp Corral, a free weeklong camp for children of wounded or deceased members of the military. It also has a GC Cares Assistance Fund for its employees who are in need. Eighty-five percent of its employees say Golden Corral is a great place to work, according to the Great Place to Work Institute. None of these things are referenced in the advertisement.

Teasing a child that she might not be as favored as her brother may have struck an advertising firm as gentle ribbing in which many families engage. But making the daughter the brunt of a joke in an advertisement selling endless plates of differently prepared chicken seems callous. Granted, the father does come off as a bit of a jerk. But that too is an odd choice for an ad trying to lure us in to eat as much chicken as humanly possible in one sitting.

There’s no ethical upside in trying to sell more chicken by sending a message that it’s OK to make a child feel bad about herself. The right thing for any company leaders to ask themselves when creating advertisements is: What message are we sending with this ad?

I’m sure the Golden Corral advertisement is meant to be funny. I’m equally confident that some viewers chuckle upon seeing the advertisement for the first time. But in an effort to get a cheap laugh, is Golden Corral truly sending the message it wants to send? Humor can be a funny thing.

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) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

 

(Fourteen years ago, I wrote about another couple of ads (Ikea, Pizza Hut) in which the message was curious. You can find that column and the ads here.)
 

 

Mother and daughter's relationship stalls over auto-fixing partner

A reader we’re calling Carla wrote to ask whether her mother is a hypocrite and behaving unethically. By Carla’s account, she and her mother got along famously until Carla began a relationship with the person who has been her partner for more than two years. She and her mother still get along about most other things, Carla wrote, but when it comes to her partner, their relationship has stalled.

“My mother doesn’t like my partner,” wrote Carla. Carla wrote that her mother has told her on several occasions of her dislike for her partner and that she wished Carla would break off the relationship and find someone new. Carla writes that her mother is not specific about what she doesn’t like, but she makes her dislike clear. What’s more, Carla’s mother refuses to talk directly to Carla’s partner.

But here’s the rub. Carla’s mother loves that Carla’s partner knows how to fix cars that are broken down or in disrepair, especially when those cars belong to someone in Carla’s family. “She will think nothing,” Carla wrote, of asking Carla’s partner to travel sometimes hours away to help one of Carla’s siblings or cousins when they have a car problem. “She once asked them to fly to a different city to help!” wrote Carla.

“My partner always says ‘yes,’” wrote Carla. Without hesitation, they will make time to travel to the relative’s car, assess the situation, pick up some parts at the local auto body shop if needed, and then get the car running again — so far, without fail.

“If she hates my partner so much, isn’t it wrong for her to keep asking for their help?”

As I regularly do when I am faced with a question that seems to fall outside the specific realm of determining the right thing to do, I must state that I am not a relationship counselor. That Carla’s mother can’t accept her choice of a partner when Carla seems safe and happy in her relationship strikes me that there is something going on in the relationship between Carla and her mother that could use some expert help. I am not the guy to give it.

But I will try to help Carla sort of what the right thing might be to do here for both Carla and her mother.

If Carla is upset that her mother asks for her partner’s help when her mother doesn’t have a kind word to say about them, the right thing for Carla to do is to decline the requests, which always get filtered through Carla. If Carla’s mother continues to want the help, then the right thing is for her to contact Carla’s partner directly to ask them. The partner can say yes or no. By talking with Carla’s partner directly, an unintended consequence might be that she grows to appreciate them more.

If Carla’s mother refuses to contact Carla’s partner directly for help because she doesn’t like them and doesn’t want to talk to them, then perhaps the right thing is for her to find someone else she can ask for help when she needs 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) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

 

Should you be a lender or a borrower?

In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Polonius advises his son, Laertes, who is about to leave Denmark for France: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” I’m not confident that his advice was meant to be iron-clad, but it came to mind recently after hearing from a reader we’re calling Val.

Val wrote that a recent exchange with an old classmate left him perturbed. About a decade ago, when Val was a graduate student with scarce resources, his old classmate offered to give him the textbooks he had used for a course Val subsequently took.

“It was generous of him,” wrote Val. But a few weeks ago Val was taken aback to receive an email from the old friend asking him if he could return the books he had loaned to Val. Val was floored by the request, since it was never clear that the books had been on loan, and because so many years has passed since the transaction. Complicating the request further was that Val no longer had the books. He had passed them on to another student who was in need.

“Doesn’t this seem wrong?” Val wrote.

Val’s story reminds me of a story my parents once told me about how angry they were after a friend who had loaned my father a suit to interview for jobs when he was starting out had contacted them years later asking for a return of the suit. “Pretty nervy,” my father had said. The return request created a rift between my father and his friend that never fully healed and that he still talked about decades after the incident. He too couldn’t return the suit since he had long separated from it after several moves as he went along in his career.

As a kid, I always thought it was kind of severe for my father to allow a disagreement about a borrowed suit to upend a friendship. But then, he too was never clear that the suit was a loan rather than a gift to help out a friend.

Confusion over a loan vs. a gift gets at the issue in both Val’s and my father’s stories. Each misinterpreted a kindness as something other than what it was. There was no malice involved; it was simply a misunderstanding.

I’m a firm believer that it is OK to be both a borrower and lender. Lending something to a friend in need can be a great kindness. But the right thing to do when making a loan is for the lender to make it as clear as possible at the outset of the transaction that he or she or they would like whatever is being loaned to be returned when the borrower is through needing the item.

The right thing for Val to do is to tell his friend he misunderstood the book exchange and paid the favor forward to another student in need. His friend may be upset, but Val should be honest and let his friend decide how to respond. My hope is they will not let this misunderstanding get in the way of their friendship.

I wish my father had done the same. In the interest of following Polonius’ other well-known line from “Hamlet,” that “brevity is the soul of wit,” I’ll just end things here.

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) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.