[taustin]

Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer

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.

Yeah. For most people, their own opinion deserves more weight than opinions they disagree with.

Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer

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.

I said I don't really agree with the position. But it's not an unreasonable or irrational one, as has bee claimed. It costs them money, directly. If the employees work on commission, it costs them money, directly, as well. There's nothing unreasonable about a busienss trying to cut their operating costs. (Note I've also said that those reasonable objections obviously don't apply to book stores.)

Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer

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?

Again, I don't agree with the position that it's unethical, but if one did, I would guess that using Amazon's bandwidth would be unethical, too, but to a far lesser degree, since the bandwidth you use literally costs too little to measure, where wasting a salesman's time in, say, an electronics store can cost the store hudnreds of dollars (or more) in business, and the salesman a significant percentage of tha in commission.