Beer Pricing - A Moral Responsibility?

I'd leave some for someone else, but I'd buy most of it and not feel bad at all

 

I see it as you win some, you lose some. It balances out the places that charge you double for KBS/BCBS/etc. If I'm shopping for a new car and I get a deal that seems to be way below market price, are you seriously suggesting I should just hand them a few extra thousands dollars? Get real...

I wonder how many of these moral high-grounders pass up sale prices for items, tell a shoe store they think the $80 pair of shoes should be the $140 market price, etc etc. How many have told a restaurant that they should be charging more for their steak/breakfast/what ever? Come on now... If you want to be "nice", hell, why stop at paying market price, why not just give the store owner the keys to your car? Where do you draw this arbitrary moral line?

If you want to do your "moral" duty, grab some $10 four packs and give the 'extra' money you saved to a charity...

 

Point taken, though I don't see how undercharging on a single (or, at most, a few) cases of KBS will close the shop down.

 

Let's see.......

A deli
Not advertised
$10 a 4-pack

I would be questioning whether it's KBS or not.

 

Whenever I see something like this, or even think I do, I just ask the manager if they're sure that's the right price. The beer tends to taste better when you do . Strangely enough, it's always come back as "yes" in those few times it's happened to me.

One of those times was indeed when there was a distributor error, and the manager said that he checked the invoice up and down to make sure everything was in order, and then put the beer on the shelf at normal markup- passing the savings on to the customers. That does happen, but it's better to make sure anyway- especially if it's a place where you regularly shop.

 

I understand your point, and it's valid. I just view it differently. To me, if a person drops a five-dollar bill on the street, they didn't make "a mistake;" some money just fell out of their pocket -- it's their money and I have no business taking it for myself. If a cashier gave me incorrect change, while it is a mistake, I would feel dishonest keeping it for myself because I'm getting something for nothing. In the KBS scenario, a business has a set a price for a product, and while it might be one person who mis-labeled the four-pack, it takes another to scan the item and accept the $10 for the product that they should know should be priced higher. As a consumer, I am entitled to buy the product for the price at which it is listed and sold without inquiring further. I'm not taking something that isn't mine and I'm not getting something for nothing.

 

I bet it was a truck delivery guy's mistake, and the deli wasn't even supposed to get the beer- maybe Breakfast Stout instead.

 

Yes, as a Beer Advocate I think I would have a moral responsibility to inform the shop that is a really low price and that they might want to reconsider.

 

It probably won't, but that's not the point. The point is living in accordance with my own personal values.

 

I'm just going to chime in and say it's awesome living in NYC and being to get craft beer on nearly every corner. Even the bodega across from the Marcy projects that I shop at has decent selection of craft.

 

I think we'll just have to agree to disagree. Businesses are nothing but people working together for a common purpose (selling stuff, making money, whatever), but taking something you know you shouldn't from a business is no different from taking something you know you shouldn't from a person. You're just taking something from a group of people instead of one person. And again, I'm just talking about when this mistake is obvious and you're reasonably sure the store (and its employees) is not aware of it.

 

Yikes, I hope this post is meant to be completely ironic. You say the "do unto others" golden rule are words to live by, and then curse at and name-call others for posting their opinions?

 

Totally respect that. And I live in accordance with mine.

 

Understood. Agree to disagree

 

The argument is how anyone, who knows (except they don't) that someone is being taken advantage of, can respect what the definition of beer advocacy really means. And by god, if he has to curse at some mfuckers to get the point across, i.e. providing his own valid opinion (as valid as anyone else's) then so be it. Welcome to America.

I am officially done with this thread.

 

I think the point here is that if fewer people conducted themselves based on the idea that situations like this were a "win" to make up for all the times you lost, maybe people wouldn't "lose" as often, if you get my drift. In this case, the business (or employee, or truck driver, or someone) is the "loser". Now they need to get a "win" to balance out the "loss".

Rather than making sure things are balancing out on some imaginary economic-karma ledger, perhaps people should just act with regard to what they feel is the right thing to do.

Comparing this particular situation to a sale price is disingenuous. A sale is a store owner's conscious decision to charge under market value for a good for a reason that, in his mind, benefits his business in the long run in some way. It's also disingenuous to compare a packaged product with an established price point to the wild west of restaurants where a meal may cost anywhere between $2 and $200 based on the scale of the restaurant and type of food. Unlike beer, most non-fast food joints don't price their offerings on a strict margin approach.

But you have gotten to the bottom of the question: where do you draw the line? And the answer, as noted above, is that the line should be drawn between what's "right" and what isn't. The tricky part is that how do you define what's "right". And that, I suppose, must be answered by the individual.

 

Somewhere, the price has gone awry, and it is indeed your responsibility to correct the problem--by buying their inventory at that price so that the market price can prevail. The owner will realize the pricing error when someone such as yourself rationalizes the KBS market by buying all you can get your hands on at that price.

I would buy one four pack to start, then go immediately back in and pick up two more. And again the next morning, and again, and so on until the price is fixed.

 

A similar thing happened at my local, but not with beer. They have three humidor cabinets of good cigars as well there, and one day I noticed Oliva V's were priced at 2.75 each (usually an 8.00 ish cigar). When I got to the counter with one in my hand, I asked the man, who was the store manager, if he was sure the price was right? This gave him an opportunity to check it out and fix it, but didn't give him a clear indication from me that I believed it was far off. He told me it was the right price, so I bought three, gave one away to a friend, and next visit bought 3 more. Two weeks later I went back to the store and they had been re-priced to 7.75.

Since then I have been kinda guilty, but kinda not, so I also wonder about the morality of pricing.

 

On the other side of this spectrum - there is a supermarket in Brooklyn selling a single bottle of KBS for $20!

http://brewyorknewyork.com/post/115879469118/forest-hills-key-food-charges-20-for-a-bottle-of

 

My son starts pre-school in a few months, if you guys want to copy his notes let me know. I can scan them in and e-mail them to you as a PDF.