Originally posted by capt. apathy
the thing is that you wife probably didn't even realize she was stealing until it was pointed out to her
Yep. And she's not the only normally-good person I've found doing the same thing.
My officemate once had a coupon for $200 off a new PC that expired on December 31. On January 1, the price for the particular PC he wanted came down to a point he could afford. He went to the store to buy it and presented the expired coupon. Not only did he get the new lower regular price, but the cashier mistakenly gave him the $200 off, too. He came back to the office bragging about how great a deal he got from the scam.
All I could say was "Yeah, you got a heckuva deal, John. By the way, how are your two little girls coming along?" I don't know if he took the hint about being a role model or not, but I didn't press the matter further.
As I mentioned earlier, I would've forgotten all about the CART shirt incident if my wife hadn't recently been thinking about her parents and how messed up they were on certain things, particularly how her dad is fixated on money and keeping it any way he can and how her mom is always threatening to leave him but never does because she doesn't have any money of her own (she turns her social security over to him to manage the household finances).
Recently her dad was out at a new mall and picked up a lamp at Bombay Company on clearance because it had a damaged leg. He picked it up for 60% off regular price. A little while later he was out shopping at his usual mall and stopped in to talk to the store manager, who knows him because he's always in the mall walking around. My wife's dad mentioned that he had a lamp that was damaged and asked if the manager would let him exchange it for a new one. The manager, not knowing the lamp had been discounted because of the damage, accepted the exchange and my father-in-law got a brand new lamp.
When my mother in law related this story to my wife, she immediately saw it was a scam, but also knew that her father was proud of his "shrewd business transaction". It was this incident that prompted her to remember the CART shirt moment when I adjusted her moral compass to True North.
Is it any wonder then, that corporations are having ethics problems?
I recently read a scam whereby MCI was re-directing calls intended for rural areas where telephone service is expensive to provide. MCI was sending the calls into Canada, then re-directing them back into the US where AT&T would absorb the cost of the call as a longdistance charge. MCI was passing its business costs onto its competitor. "Shrewd business transactions" at its corporate best.
AT&T never would've known about the scam if a district attorney hadn't alerted them to it.
