Ethical Americans

Cavid Carnoy, editor of CNET, wrote a piece describing a very generous return policy at Costco and Sam's Club, that allows customers to return a product during a course of its lifetime (which, potentially, could be years) for a full refund, provided that the product isn't damaged. Carnoy wonders if this isn't an invitation to abuse: given the rapidly falling prices of high-ticket electronics, people will be tempted to exchange that expensive last year's HDTV or LCD TV for this year's bigger and cheaper models.

What's really interesting is the reaction of the article's readers in the Comments: most commenters piled on Carnoy for... lack of moral judgement in suggesting such an unethical way of abusing a return policy of a great company! Aside from the fact that the readers obviously misread the author's message, their outrage is very encouraging. Apparently, there are plenty of people with high moral standards in America, at least among CNET's readers.