Ethics in Business (My Rant)
This past weekend I was supposed to go on a houseboat with a group of my girlfriends for my stagette. The houseboat company was out of Saskatchewan and I won’t say where because I do not want to give away the company. But, on Thursday (the day before we were supposed to leave) my friend got a phone call saying that they weekend before there was a stag on the boat. The boat managed to have a fire start on it and the hot tub was broken. My friend told him that we would not come unless we got half our money back. Not talking her seriously, she asked her dad to contact him. Later that evening (11:00pm) my friend got another phone call from the company saying that the water heater was broken and he canceled the appointment with the repair man because we had canceled our trip. That was not what was discussed earlier in the day, but my friend told him that now we would no longer be coming because we want to have hot water. He got off the phone saying make your decision, but don’t call back tonight because I won’t answer.
We ended up paying $600 and not going on the houseboat. The company would not give us a full refund for something that was broken and clearly not what we asked for. My friend told him there was no reason we shouldn’t get a full refund because this is not the product we wanted.
My purpose of telling this story is that I am going to be a Business Education teacher and I hope that if any of my students go on to own their own business, or even be part of a business, that they do not act the way this man did. Would you like to pay for something, only to have it broken when it arrived? No. When you buy a computer or product that has a manufacturers defect, you take it to the store and get a full refund, or exchange. I think this man was extremely unethical and we paid a deposit to reserve the boat, not to have it taken away when the boat was broken.
My grandpa owns a truck rental company and when they rent a truck, the customer pays a deposit. If something happens to that truck which enables them to rent it out in the expected condition, the deposit is refunded. I believe that should be the case. This was not however this weekend, and I think some people can be very greedy and dishonest when it comes to businesses. I will use this story when I am teaching my students so they can have an example of how NOT to run a business.
Alec Couros said,
June 17, 2008 at 7:37 am
Awwww, this is really too bad. You’re right, this is not good business practice. It’s really unfortunate, and it will be important for you to teach ethical business practice. If anything, you have a good non-example to share with your future students.
Corinne said,
June 18, 2008 at 12:38 am
This example would be such a good one to illustrate not only ethics in business but also the rights of the consumer. I wish I would have been educated, in high school, on issues such as this one because we deal with these kind of situations all the time in our everyday life.