Spirit of sale

When a business person is offering goods or service their words carry an emotional context or spirit. Customers understand words but they are also sensitive to nuance, emotion and personal assurances the job will be a good job. A small business with a good reputation for quality and fairness has the additional obligation of delivering goods and services of like kind and quality as before. For example a caterer has built a reputation for providing good of high quality for a reasonable price yet still more costly than average. A convention for adolescent skateboarders has contracted the services of the caterer to provide food for lunch. Normally the caterer used only organic fruits and vegetables. Seeing an opportunity to make an extra profit the cater buys non organic vegetables. After all in their thinking these are young people who would not appreciate the quality anyway. At this point the business switches from being one that is cultivating a clientele for one that is hunting for a quick buck. see hunting and farming.

Spirit of sale: Another aspect of the spirit of a sale regards the tactis of the customer. If the customer is extremely annoying, manipulative, belligerent or non responsive the spirit of the business person to perform is impacted. As ethical as business is conflict and bad behavior impacts the ability of a business to be forthright, honest and ethical. Mathematical game theory describes an ethical strategy in these types of situations. It is called tit-for-tat. Once the spirit of a deal is gone it is all about there is left to guide business. There are hazards of the tit-for-tat theory and that is the survival of a business and the emotional health of its employees can be scarred by conflict in a way that affects other transactions. The fully ethical business recognizing this will simply refund monies owed even if the customer is unaware they are eligible for the refund. Being ethical is also about a survival strategy to conserve energies for truly important problems. It is incumbent for a business not to get into a conflict in the first place by recognizing signs of trouble in the first place and carefully dealing with problem clients. This does lead to a form of enlightened discrimination, but sometimes necessary discrimination.

The ethical description of this is transaction is complex. You are not helping the longevity of your long long reputation by degrading the food for short-term gain. This question the rationality of your decision, do you really need the money. If you need a windfall profit to avoid bankruptcy it would be understandable.  Degrading your product for more money does not seem reasonable if long term gains will be thwarted. Good businesses have standards and a self regarding duty to acknowledge those standards. When a business conceals from itself that it is lowering its quality and standards there arises an ethical split in the business. Having standards does not mean you cannot change them, but if you do, you do so in a way that it benefits the business to survive a short term emergency or the long term health of the business. Business decisions are best made on reason and not greed.

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