I understood your post, just thought it was funny. Not as funny as the latter though. I would agree with that.

That really has nothing to do with what his quoted post said. In that situation, he could reasonably expect them to make changes back to the original price. Different than the amazon situation.

I don't understand why you think that a "personal code of morals" can't include flexibility but I'm tolerant of people whose personal codes do not. I guess it's easier on the brain when you don't have to base your reaction on the situation.

And I don't agree that the restaurant analogy is a good one. I'd point out a mistake in the bill also. It doesn't prove anything.

But the problem lies in the assumption that everyone who doesn't subscribe to moral relativism has the same set of morals, which is untrue. What about the instance of someone who is not making a flexible case by case justification in the Amazon glitch, but who, in their overall moral perspective, doesn't find their actions to be immoral?

I made one order on the sale. I don't feel as though I have done anything wrong. I offered to return the opened items twice, not out of remorse, but to avoid hassle. Amazon didn't take that bait either time. They claim to be refunding me now and if they don't, I will dispute the charge. I have no qualms with my actions in this instance. I do find the actions of those who made expansive amounts of orders a tad on the other side of 'wrong'. But that's my prerogative, and I haven't taken them to task for it because I'm assuming that they either don't see anything wrong with it in their moral perspective or they are already fighting the guilt, and in either case my harping on them is more harm than help.

Of course there are going to be other posters here with different moral perspectives. God, I would hope so. That's not the problem -- the problem lies in posters who assume that because they have a moral perspective that theirs is THE moral perspective. It's the difference between righteous and self-righteous. The former requires that you are morally upright; for the latter you only have to assume you are.

-Toilet Dcuk

If you read my post, you would see I stated it was different than the Amazon situation. My point, which has direct bearing to his post, was that his blanket assessment that having a case-by-case moral compass was flawed (as I understood him), was not necessarily true. Sure, he could reasonably expect the restaurant to adhere to the posted prices in the menu. But what if they didn't, and insisted he pay the price on the final bill? What then? I merely suggested he would not adhere to his strict 'pay what they say I owe' moral stance and would change his repsonse in this case, which might not be such a bad thing. If he decided to pay what he felt was fair, even if it was more than the lower prices of the menu, it would still be an example or moral relativism.
To fit this in with the current topic, I reasonably expected Amazon to adhere to our agreement of the prices on my invoice they constructed, or if not, to at least adhere to the TOS which states they have the right the cancel my order if they did not agree. What I did not agree to was their unilateral decision to charge me more, which neither adhered to our original agreement per the invoice and completed shipping email nor to the TOS they constructed. They can't create a new contract without my agreement.

i86, I agree that the situations are different than the amazon one, but I don't really understand the rest of your point. I do agree that Amazon shouldn't chang the bill after the fact, but that doesn't mean you can't make a moral judgement on taking advantage of the initial deal. I guess I have just been rubbed a little raw by some people in this thread, the moral High Horse isn't one sided.

Look. This situation is really painfully simple. Posters read about a pricing error in Amazon's server. They knew it was a pricing error. There was no mystery about it, none of the feigned confusion some have tried to pass off. It was an error, posted as such, and some chose to go to the site to exploit it.

They didn't go because they had to have these box sets. They weren't innocents caught in pricing confusion. They went and ordered because they KNEW there had been a MISTAKE and they wanted to exploit it. Period. This whole playing-the-victim nonsense is just obnoxious.

If it's upsetting you that much, you're more than welcome to troll elsewhere.

So are YOU saying that YOU did not know that the final checkout price at Amazon was incorrect? Was ANYONE posting here unaware of the glitch?Didn't think so... Apples and oranges, my friend, apples and oranges.

And I did not claim to adhere to absolute morality - you are grossly mischaracterizing what I posted. Take a deep breath, remove the chip from your shoulder and read my post more slowly.

The basic premise of what you posted from slashdot was that, no matter what your own personal code of morality might be, when faced with an amoral corporation having no morals, it is ok to behave in a way that may go against your own morals because, after all, the amoral corporation would behave in the same way. In other words, it's ok to abandon your usual principles, whatever those principles may be, in order to stick it to the amoral corporation.

It is remarkable how consistent you are in mistating and mischaracterizing what I write. I never once characterized ANY moral stance as "flawed." I simply observed that the slashdot post quoted by Peep advocated suspending one's own moral code (whatever that code might be) when dealing with an amoral corporation like Amazon. This is NOT the same thing as a case-by-case morality - it is more like an abandonment of all moral sense (aka nihilism) when confronted with a corporation. "Stick it to the man..."

At no point did I even criticize the slashdot quote or anything else for that matter. Notice also that I have never, not once, condemned or judged anyone who took advantage of the glitch. I simply expressed my preference for holding to my own personal moral sense even when dealing with a supposedly amoral corporation or business. I suspect most people have the same preference.

At one point early on (and I think I even posted it in one of the earlier threads) I did believe that because of the timing of the sale, and the facts that the promotion application was changed (i.e. no longer doubled) within a few hours yet they still shipped the items (my last order shipped 31 hours after ordering), this could have been a holiday bonus to certain customers who used the sale early. However, 5 days later (after I had received my sets and opened around half of them), Amazon made it clear that they made a mistake. Take that for what you will, but businesses (and strangers) have been far more generous than that during the holidays. I argue that it was (dare I write the word) absolutely impossible for anyone to KNOW this was a glitch until 28 Dec when they received the email. However, what I did know from previous reading here and other deal forums, Amazon frequently cancels any such orders they consider errors before they ship.

And as stated, the restaurant example was not meant to be congruent with the Amazon situation, I was just pointing out that it would be difficult for one to logically adhere to a black & white 'doing this is always right, doing this is always wrong' stance.

I probably did mischaracterize your post by questioning whether anyone can stick with absolute morality, but your post was unclear in that it makes it seem like taking a case-by-case approach is inferior to a code of ethics etched in stone, which it is not, for reasons expanded on by toiletduck.

I started reading the original glitch thread within an hour or so of when it was started. EVERYONE posting knew it was a glitch of some kind. It was a feeding frenzy - so much so that there were posts asking people to stop posting lest the thread become too visible and the glitch fixed. The obviousness of the glitch coupled with the extreme defensiveness shown by many after Amazon sent out its emails is a big reason why these threads are so entertaining.

I don't know how to get you to see the point but that line shows me that you totally missed it.

Yup.
http://forum.dvdtalk.com/showthread.php?t=487482

Reading through some of the posts in it show what you state. There were even
some cut and pasting their invoices which showed exactly what the error was.
Midway through the thread a very good estimation as to why some had made
it to the shipping phase was given.

That's your interpretation. My interpretation is that turnabout is fairplay - as a moral principle it is consistent across all spectra. You may disagree with the principle of doing unto others as they would do unto you, but if relativism is 'bad' and absolutism is 'good' as you seem to be implying, then it is plenty absolute.

Look, I'm sure the majority of people ordering from this deal knew that there was a glitch on Amazon's site. Did we exploit it? Hell yeah! However, I think most of us figured the orders were going to get cancelled anyway by Amazon at some point. That's the modus operandi around here. When a deal that's too good to be true pops up, you jump on it, even though you fully expect it will get cancelled. No one has evil intentions. It's just a little game that we consumers have learned to play through years and years of online misprices and misprogrammed deals. We order, they cancel. We order, they cancel. We order, they cancel. We order, they...ship it?

Yes, there's always that small chance that a company will let some orders slip through. It's happened before, so why shouldn't we at least take the chance and order? And then wah lah, it happens! Amazon fixes the glitch but they still approve some orders and ship them out, including 27 orders to a single address. So hey, maybe Amazon ain't so bad after all. Obviously they knew about the glitch but decided to honor some orders anyway. What a swell company.

But woah, hold on. Suddenly Amazon decides to change the rules of the game. The rules are unwritten but everybody is pretty well aware of them. Just like you shouldn't steal a base in baseball when you have a big lead, you shouldn't go back on a deal once you've accepted payment and shipped out the merchandise. It's not the law, but it's damn close. It's the rules of the game!

Of course, no one can really blame Amazon for not following the rules and for wanting to get their stuff back. Especially when they see that some customer has ordered over 50 box sets and cost them over a thousand dollars in lost revenue. They have every right to try and get their merchandise returned. But see...they go about it the wrong way. They get mad, they panic. All they can see in their minds is the guy who ordered fifty sets selling them on Ebay. They decide to set a precedent for future generations of glitch seekers. They decide to play hardball.

But they misunderstand us. They don't realize that many of us are not hardened criminals or online predators. We don't stalk Amazon hour after hour, minute after minute, searching for a loophole that will garner us cheap box sets. We're just mischievous innocents playing our usual game of "order and cancel." So they decide to send out a blanket email demanding that we return the DVD sets in unopened condition or else we'll get charged the "correct" price for it. Problem is, the email didn't arrive until a few days after many of the sets had already been delivered. Strike one! By stipulating that the sets needed to be unopened, Amazon basically removed the option for many people to return the goods. Strike two! And since the whole fiasco was the fault of Amazon's website in the first place, shouldn't they have been a little nicer? Strike three!

Yes, both the consumer and Amazon.com were at fault here. We consumers have become a little too accustomed to having online misprices and glitches get cancelled by diligent companies before they ship out. Perhaps we should have expected that Amazon would end up being too overworked during the holidays and that their sloppiness would allow a glaring misprice to go through. For that, we were at fault.

We were also at fault for believing that once an order has been charged to our credit card and delivered to us to our satisfaction, that it is ours to keep (or to return if it's defective). Years and years of online purchases made us lazy. They made us foolishly believe that merchants couldn't charge us additional funds for a completed purchase without our authorization. For that, we plead guilty.

Amazon, meanwhile, botched what could have been a wonderful customer relations scenario. Imagine if they had sent out an email stating how they had screwed up, how they knew they had no right to expect us to return the DVDs, but how grateful they would be if we did. So grateful in fact, that they would allow us to keep one DVD set of our choice at no cost to us as long as we returned the other sets. I'm sure many of us would have thought, "Damn that Amazon is a swell company. I feel terrible for trying to take advantage of them. Back go my sets. Hmm I think I'll also order about a thousand dollars worth of sh*t because they're so cool."

Unfortunately, all they can see in their little minds is the guy with fifty DVD sets refusing to return them and selling them on Ebay. So they decide to cross the line. Sir, you can do many things to me and I won't complain. You can lower the price of a CD I bought just over a month ago and I won't complain to you. You can stick my DVD into a mailing box with barely any padding and I won't complain to you. You can send me a DVD that looks like it's been opened and rewrapped and I won't complain to you. But threaten to charge my credit card without my authorization and you are playing with fire. Girls Gone Wild does stuff like that. Porn sites do stuff like that. Amazon.com, is that who you want to be associated with?

So in the end, yes, I believe that both parties were at fault here in their own special way. My only hope is that this sad and tragic situation can one day be resolved with an agreeable solution that ends up serving both parties' interests in an honorable and equally beneficial manner. Until then...screw you, Amazon!

^Well said!

After reading this, I had to check whether I was in the right thread.

I agree. Great job, Perkinsun Dzees!

Wow. I agree 100%. Great post!

Oh, well, then it's all okay. Then you're right - you're all innocents snared by an evil corperation. How did I miss that?

Good god. The use of the word "tragic" had been reduced to anything mildly inconvienant. Now it's "tragic" when you try to scam someone and get caught.

Haha. What do you mean, Goldblum? Clearly, having to pay for something you ordered is sad and tragic. In fact, I think that if you look up tragic in Webster's, it says something about having to pay for things that you ordered.

Oh the humanity!

Fixed.

Apart from these minor errors, nice post.

That arguement goes right out the window with the fact that people post
these "deals" as soon as they're found on sites like this and others. In the
short amount of time that this glitch was active, how many just happened
to be on Amazon ordering, and how many saw a thread calling attention to
the glitch on this or some other site and went because of that. Who knows,
had it been only the former Amazon may have handled this situation differently.


Some maybe (though not your obvious sarcastic last sentence), but after the
sentiments expressed in this and other threads, I'm of the camp that the majority
are just looking for a way to keep the sets and anything resembling that stance
is gold to them.

I just got the exact same mailing that was posted. It was a phishing attempt.