I sure can't help you

My wife's smartphone was stolen last week. Suspending the number on that stolen phone so no one else could use it was simple enough.

But since she uses the phone as her primary work phone, it was important for her to get another phone set up with the same number as soon as possible. A quick call and a long wait on hold with our cellphone service provider got us to a service representative who wanted to help us. We told him the situation and asked how much it would cost to buy a replacement phone.

"$649," he said.

We pointed out that we were three weeks away from being eligible for an every two-year upgrade at a discounted price. He pointed out that the same phone would cost $199 in three weeks.

Pointing out to him that the only reason a new phone was needed was because the old one had been stolen resulted in a lecture about how they could not make exceptions because their contract with the phone's manufacturer could be canceled if they did.

We hung up and hunted around to see if we had an old phone lying around the house that my wife could have her cell phone number transferred to for three weeks while we waited. Having successfully found a very old phone, we called our cellphone service provider back to ask about the temporary switch. My wife would have to wait the three weeks to be able to have her contacts switched over since it was a very old nonsmart phone. But saving the $450 seemed worth the three-week wait.

When a different service representative answered, we told her what we wanted to do.

"Why do you want to do that?" she asked.

We explained that even though the phone had been stolen, that we have been customers for years, and that we were willing to sign on for another two years and three weeks if need be, we were told we had to wait until we were eligible for an upgrade and didn't want to spend an extra $450.

"We can do better than that," she said. And then she proceeded to move up my wife's eligibility date so we could qualify for the lower price.

No talk of concern about the phone manufacturer canceling the relationship. No questioning of any sort. She heard what had happened and responded by trying to provide service to a customer in need. She even texted us to make sure the phone had arrived and was working.

So who did the right thing? The first representative who claimed nothing could be done? Or the second who worked to find a solution?

Customers should not have to resort to asking to speak to a manager when a service representative refuses to try to solve an issue. And it shouldn't take repeated calls to different service representatives to hope one among them might be amenable to resolving an issue.

It falls on companies -- cellphone companies, banks, credit card companies, cable television companies -- to empower their employees to do what's right by the customer as long as it doesn't cheat the company. That's both the right thing to do and a good business decision if companies don't want their customers to take their business elsewhere. 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. 

Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 

(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Return to sender, please, return to sender already

B.P., a reader from Ohio, moved into his house more than four years ago. Even after four years, however, he continues to receive mail addressed to the house's former owner. The occasional junk mail addressed to the previous occupant he doesn't mind. He can simply toss that out. But he's still receiving first-class mail containing financial and retirement statements from a mutual fund company addressed to the former owner.

"I am asking you for guidance on what is the right thing to do," writes B.P.

B.P. doesn't know the former owner. He had already packed up and moved to Missouri a few months before B.P. moved in. B.P. had heard he moved there for a new job. For a while, the former owner's mail was appropriately forwarded by the post office, but that no longer seems to be happening.

So B.P. started writing "Return to Sender-Does Not Live Here" and placed the former owner's mail in his outgoing mail.

But the mail kept coming. And B.P. kept returning it. About two years ago, he called the mutual fund company to let them know that the person they were trying to reach no longer lived at the address.

He's told his letter carrier that the addressee hasn't lived there in years. The carrier acknowledged that the mail should not be delivered and told B.P. he would issue a stop notice so it wouldn't be delivered again.

The mail kept coming.

Two weeks ago, B.P. emailed the mutual fund company again and was thanked in a return email by what he believes was an "actual human being" and assured that they would forward the issue onto the "privacy team."

He's since received another piece of mail address to the former owner.

"Maybe I am getting grumpy in my ripe old age of 38, but I feel that it isn't my responsibility anymore to fix what others are not taking responsibility for. When is enough, enough?" he asks. "What is the right thing to do?"

B.P. has gone above and beyond what most people would conclude was a reasonable effort to get this mail situation straightened out. But if it's first-class mail, simply chucking it in the trash is not the right thing to do. It's hardly more difficult to stick it back in the outgoing mail than it is to toss it in the trash -- more frustrating perhaps, but still the right thing to do.

The responsibility is on the former owner to notify the mutual fund company that his address has changed. Short of that, the company should honor its commitment to change the address from his former Ohio home to his new place in Missouri. And the post office should stop delivering mail to an address it knows is incorrect.

Each of these things should happen. But B.P.'s patience is wearing thin because the right thing is not happening. In the meantime, the right thing for him is to continue to return the mail and hope that one day soon it will find its direct way to its intended recipient. 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. 

Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 

(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Day-old food takes on a new life

I love this idea. Dough Rauch, the former president of Trader Joe's, is launching a new business built around selling food that has passed its official sell-by date but is still perfectly consumable. The idea is to make quality food available to people who otherwise might not be able to afford it.

The Department of Agriculture estimates that $47 billionof food is wasted by retailers in the U.S. every year.

Rauch's Urban Food Initiative plans to launch a 10,000-square-foot store in a neighborhood in Boston where many low-income families live. If the goal is to reach lower-income families with affordable foods, that seems to make sense, at least on the surface.

A big challenge, however, is whether lower-income people will warm up to a store if the perception is that they're buying castoffs from more well-to-do customers. A hairstylist working in the same neighborhood toldThe Boston Globe that Dorchester does not need food that others consider undesirable.

But what if, instead of putting these markets solely in low-income neighborhoods, Urban Food Initiative tried to locate them in areas where a broader cross-section of the population lived and shopped?

That seems to be the model used by Ron Shaich, the CEO of Panera Bread, when he launched PaneraCares, a nonprofit offshoot of his public bakery company that is built on the premise of customers paying what they can afford for food. Each PaneraCares is a full-service cafe just like Panera Bread, but instead of a cash register, there's a donation box.

Some of the food at PaneraCares comes from unsold goods at the for-profit cafe. But just like the food that's passed its sell-by date, the food is still healthy and safe for consumption.

Rather than locate the PaneraCares cafes in low-income neighborhoods, part of the company's mission is to locate in areas that are economically diverse. Ostensibly, there's a practical business reason behind this since the premise is that those who can afford to pay will, while those who can't might pay less or nothing at all.

"We can't sustain it if we go to a neighborhood where there are only poor folk," Shaich told a TEDx conference in St. Louis when the nonprofit was launched.

But another consequence of locating in areas that lower-income and higher-income people might frequent is that the stigma of buying someone else's castoffs is softened. It becomes, as Shaich told his TEDx audience, "a cafe of shared responsibility."

On average, Shaich says PaneraCares takes in about 80 percent of what the full retail price on items would be. He suggests that that's enough to sustain the effort and open new stores.

I love the idea of lowering the amount of food that retailers waste every year. And when hunger remains pervasive among families, launching efforts like the Urban Food Initiative and PaneraCares suggests how strong entrepreneurs like Rauch and Shaich can truly effect change.

If the ultimate desire is to help the poor with such initiatives, however, then the right thing is to try to do them in a way that doesn't stigmatize the poor, but instead emboldens dignity with efforts that attract all segments of the economy. When the Urban Food Initiative opens, I hope to be among the first to shop there, and I hope others of all levels of income follow. 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. 

Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 

(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Must you stay? Can't you go?

In one of his memoirs, the actor Charles Grodin tells the story of being on the set of a movie with Candice Bergen. As the cameras were being set up in the main hall of a castle outside of London, he and Bergen were sitting together in an adjacent room.

Shortly after that sat, an Englishwoman appeared, Grodin writes. "She said, 'Did someone ask you to wait in here?' 'No,' we answered, a bit taken aback. She responded: 'Well, it would be so nice if you weren't here.'"

While a proper Englishwoman is not the bearer of the message, it seems that "You're not invited" messages are increasingly sent to friends or relatives who have not made the list of invitees to an upcoming wedding. I've yet to receive one myself, since my friends have the good graces to simply not invite me when they would prefer me not to be at their special day.

But event planners or the couples themselves have increasingly been deciding that rather than simply battling out a list of invitees and sending invitations to those who made the cut, they want to send a little something special to their friends and relatives who didn't pass muster.

Rina Raphael, a writer for Today.com also reported "variations of this trend," where some couples tell friends that they're on "the B list." If a preferred guest dings the couple on their invite, the friends on the B list are told they'll be in.

It used to be de rigueur -- and presumably still is in many circles -- to send wedding announcements after the wedding had occurred to let folks who hadn't been invited know you'd tied the knot. But the practice of alerting people ahead of time to something they're not going to be getting that they didn't ask to get in the first place appears to be new.

So is it the right thing to notify people about something they're not going to be invited to when you know that there's a good chance you'll hurt them more than if you simply didn't invite them?

Sometimes being overly forthcoming can clearly be cruel. A doctor must decide, for example, just how much clinical detail to provide when talking to a dying patient. Sissela Bok, the author of Lying: MoralChoice in Public and Private Life (Vintage Books, 1989), once told me: "There's great room for discretion, for knowing when not to speak."

Not netting an invitation to the wedding of the season and being informed you're dying are hardly synonymous. But the non-invitation invitation raises the question of whether deliberately doing something that is likely to exacerbate hurt feelings is the way we want to choose to behave with our friends.

Obviously, it's the bride's and groom's choice. But if they truly want to take the feelings of their non-invited friends into account, there's no valor in rubbing salt in the wounds. The friends may be hurt enough once they learn they haven't been invited. The right thing to do if you don't plan to invite someone to a wedding is to simply not invite them. 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. 

Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 

(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.