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Finger Hut Strategy Essay

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“Business ethics is the application of ethical values to business behavior. It applies to any and all aspects of business conduct, from boardroom strategies and how companies treat their employees and suppliers to sales techniques and accounting practices. Ethics goes beyond the legal requirements for a company and is, therefore, about discretionary decisions and behavior guided by values. Business ethics is relevant both to the conduct of individuals and to the conduct of the organization as a whole.” With this statement can we say that Fingerhut’s price strategy is unethical? In order to answer this question we need to digest certain issues of “Fingerhut’s Price Strategy” case with the point of views of Roger Crisp “autonomy and creation …show more content…

Roger Crisp would raise the issues that the marketing techniques of Fingerhut cause their customers to act automatonously. Crisp would affirm his idea with the fact that the specialized mail catalog created desires that forced (instead of made them want) its customers to buy their goods. The idea of making their payments easy, low and displaying them instead of the real end price, Crisp would see as deceiving. Crisp would say that by Fingerhut relating the real price of the goods to low payments in a way is like brainwashing their customers to believe that the item is actually cheaper when in reality their goods were up 100% more expensive then their competitors. The fact that their customers were in the bottom of the wealth pyramid, it could be seen that they were not well educated and probably could not really see the price differences in the goods they were buying and the price that they should, in a fair market, be paying. So with Fingerhut marketing techniques and motives, Crisp would affirm that the low-income consumers were being exploited and therefore Fingerhut was conducting its business unethically. Milton Friedman would not agree with Roger Crisp that Fingerhut exploited their low-income customers. Friedman would look at the “Fingerhut’s Price Strategy” case in different point of view; he would say that Fingerhut was acting ethically because they were conducting business in a

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