Beer Pricing - A Moral Responsibility?

If the seller screws up the price, it's not my responsibility as a consumer to do anything besides pay the price in question. Does this make it moral? Hardly, but nor does it make it immoral. The market place is fundamentally amoral, and so is any individual business-transaction - even if one side screws up.

 

In your over-thought analysis, you didn't consider that there were 5 4-packs (or less) of the product remaining. This is like arguing the ethics of arbitrage trades. The existence of the opportunity to purchase a mispriced good is so small that there's negligible economic impact.

The fact that you called this "deadweight economic loss" on a rare beer where there is unlikely to be a supply and demand equilibrium makes me believe you're overthinking this. The undersupply is well known and theoretically the price should double, triple, quintuple, but the externality of the likely loss of goodwill for selling KBS at a price where supply and demand are in equilibrium would cause a greater economic loss for Founders than them simply failing to maximize their profits on a limited release package.

Also, you point out the opportunity to do a net economic good by pointing out a pricing problem. While I don't disagree with the sentiment, I consider my personal economic good to be far more important than some macroeconomic good enabled by my observation of a pricing error. If I were OP, I'd probably buy half of it then sell it at cost to friends to share the wealth.

But...yeah bro, I think you'll do fine on your macroecon final this semester, good job!

 

Yeah, the honest thing to do is tell the clerk or the owner (in the case of a bodega, often the same person). They probably have an obligation to sell it to you at the labeled price -- but being a Beer Advocate means not just getting what you want, especially when that would mean deliberately taking advantage of someone. I mean, if you want every local deli to carry KBS or similarly desirable beers, making sure that the retailer gets screwed isn't going to encourage that development. You're placing your own immediate, hype-fed gratification first, and missing a chance to "put the Respect back into Beer."

 

Glad to see (as the one who raised this in the regional thread quoted in the OP) that I'm not alone on this.

 

More likely, the guy putting on price tags looked at the Founders All Day and Centennial IPA at $9.99/6 pack and said "screw it, I'll just make everything from this Founders box we got today $9.99".

 

I really don't see any problem with something like this. Lots of limited stuff in my region has its own thread, even a thread just for my city. I'd buy 2 or 3 4-packs and if you really feel like you need some good karma, there are plenty of people on here that will miss out. Do a $4$ trade or something. Give a couple to a friend. I don't feel any responsibility to any business owner based on their pricing. If it was somebody I actually knew personally, sure, I'd say something. Otherwise, I'd pick up at least some and feel pretty good about the world.

 

I don't know NYC particularly well, but I wonder if some of the folks in the regional thread are more willing to swoop it up, no questions asked, as a sort of payback for years of paying high prices? Doesn't make it right, of course -- I think the right thing to do is to at least give the store the chance to correct the error. Just wondering if the psychology is different for NYC residents.

 

Yeah I'm sure that's part of it, and a couple of people who disagreed with me alluded to that

 

I'd tell the store owner that they had it way underpriced. It's no different than if a cashier gives me change for a $20, when I handed them a $10. I speak up.

 

I agree.

 

Found a great deal. If he received the case he should have known what to price it as as well. There are probably some safeguards for him as well. I'd be pleasantly surprised if it rang up as $10 at the register but would be expecting it ring up at $22.99. I'd be happy with 4 bottles of KBS.

If I felt guilty after buying it I'd tell the shopkeeper after, but I would definitely buy at least one 4-pack

We drink beer, let's talk morals after a few brews.

 

I think a key assumption you are making is that it's an isolated incident of undercharging. In that case, the supply effectively is fixed and the supply curve is vertical, such that there would be no deadweight loss and only a large consumer surplus (that said, I want to give that statement further thought before I commit to it). The transaction becomes a redistribution of value/utility from the seller to the purchaser. If, however, the underpricing is not isolated (well, perhaps depending on in what way it's not isolated), then the following graph represents the situation pretty well. Substitute the unintentional underpricing for the price ceiling:

http://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deadweight-loss-price-ceiling.svg#mw-jump-to-license

I suspect that there also is potential for harmful behavioral economic effects stemming from loss aversion when and if the seller realizes its mistake, but I'm going to have to give more thought to that aspect.

As for "the stuff sell[ing] out in hours regardless," that's the result of intentional, as opposed to an unintentional, pricing below the market clearing price. That's a tactic that sellers use to build (or, perhaps more often, defensively use to protect) goodwill among their customers. It's essentially a marketing tool, and sellers believe that the value of that marketing exceeds the value of the foregone producer surplus.

 

This is exactly what happened to me when I found some Saison-Brett (IIRC) priced at around $8 at a local grocery store. I let the checkout clerk know that it should be priced higher, and the guy thanked me and said he would alert the person in charge of the beer department, then sold me the bottles I had at the marked $8 price. Karma baby.

 

I'd have no issues at all picking up a few 4 packs at that price.

 

Given the fact that we might reasonably conclude it WAS, in fact, an isolated incident (based on the fact that the folks in that area expressed surprise at its price, a desire to purchase at that price, etc., suggesting it was priced properly elsewhere), the economic distortions you're concerned about are either nonexistent or immaterial.

The rest of your info is dandy and all - perfectly reasonable economic theory - but it really pertains to general pricing issues (i.e., producers setting price maximums below the market clearing price, which you noted above), which is an entertaining discussion but not really pertinent to the scenario presented here.

In short, you're overthinking it It's an ethical question, not an economic one. And, as you noted in a separate post, you'd probably tell them, because it's the right thing to do. Simple as that.

 

Buy a 4 pack and then clue in the Deli. The deli will be happy and so will you. Also, it allows the deli to stay in business for longer with more potential error's that you can benefit from in the future!

 

Buy it and laugh about it. Store owners markups on top of some brewery markups are getting a little bit crazy. They'll definitely make their money back many times over

 

Another analogy would be, if you're walking down the street or sitting on the bus and see someone drop a $5 bill, do you pick it up and tell them? I would, and I'd want others to do the same thing for me.

OP says there are no "right answers," but I'd argue that there are. In some cases, morality is relative but I don't think it really is in this case. People saying you should just take advantage of the situation and say nothing (or even tell your friends about it) are ignoring what they know is the right thing to do.

Funny thing is, these are probably a lot of the same people who complain about "price gouging" when they are on the receiving end.

 

It's completely different. The store (for whatever reason, even if by accident) listed the price as $9.99 for the 4-pack and that was what was paid for the 4-pack.