Originally posted by bxf Maximizing profit and taking advantage of an error is not the same thing. You, as a buyer, can shop around and attempt to reduce your cost.
Some way of maximizing profit are ethical. For example you provide more for your client at a cheap price so everybody buy from you, you get economy of scale, everybody happy.
Another way is to increase productivity and share the benefit on both side.
If you truely have different products that you can make easily that respond to different need same from the same machines and technology, you also have a nice way to ethically improve profit by serving more people. If also you provide a high end version that provide feature necessary to some people and that cost you more, it seems logical to ask for more...
Now playing on the notion of branding so you can ask more for the same product, or making a more expensive version of the extact same thing (K50 vs K30) and asking significantly more for it because it is newer, I don't find it that nice. Asking more for the exact same razor because it is advertized for womens instead of men and seeing that the bigger the shop, the more distance the 2 products can be, the bigger the price difference is because people are less likely to figure it out, I don't find it fair.... Asking more per kg for the familly pack than for the price at unit because people have a bias of thinking the familly pack that can save on wrapping will be cheaper is not ethical neither. The typical strategy to have appealing price for a few products that you know from behavioral studies people will tend to check price but asking for very high price for things people don't think to check, that's not ethical.
This is trying to deceive your clients, hoping they'll make the error to not check the price per kilogram, that they'll make the error to take the product "designed" for their gender, that they'll make the error to assume the newer K50 camera is better than the K30, induce them in error with marketing that the expensive clothes are better than the cheap one while in practice this is the same... That trying to deceive their brain to see when they don't remember that you are trying to deceive as most as you can and they should check every single bit of thing they buy from you extensively...
This is funny how we find ethical to abuse people that are not smart enough, that are not methodic enough, that are too trustfull, that are simply tired at that moment how this doesn't count... But if a merchant make an error when putting a price then benefiting of it is not ethical.
Last edited by Nicolas06; 03-17-2016 at 02:13 PM.