Quote:
Originally Posted by taustin
Morality is a matter of opinion. There's no objective measure for it, and you'll get at least as many opinions as you ask people.
There are legitimate reasons to object to "showrooming" for some retailers. In places like an electronics store, where people are shopping for expensive items they don't necessarily know much about, and are looking for help in choosing the right one, it's an expensive waste of time. The store pays the employees to spend time with people who have no intention of buying, and while helping those people, they can't help people who would buy if they could get some help. So there, I suspect, a lot of people would see it as somewhat unethical, and it is more common thant it used to be.
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We'll have to agree to disagree on whether or not morality is merely a matter of opinion; there are certainly a multitude of philosophers that would disagree with such a gross oversimplification. It might be someone's opinion that this is unethical, but not all opinions deserve equal weight.
And honestly, I just don't understand how it could be reasonable to conclude that it's unethical for a customer to use all of the information available to make an informed choice. The stores in your example made the choice to do retail in the way you describe; a customer not buying, for whatever reason is the cost of doing business that comes with that choice. These businesses should be pricing their products to take that into account, and if they can't then they fail which is sad but not the fault of consumers who made an informed business decision to buy from someone else.
Full disclosure and a Question for you: I go to the local bookstore all the time and use a smartphone app to scan UPCs on the back of books to quickly get Amazon.com reviews; if I like the book I'll typically buy it at the store or grab an ebook from Kobo. Have I acted unethically by wasting Amazon's bandwidth when I had no intention of buying from them? Or is it only immoral when we want to protect a physical bookstore's business model?