FASCINATING discussion--and I mean that, no sarcasm intended. Here's my 2 cents:
Is there such a thing as "Right" and "Wrong"? I think everyone here would agree, absolutely, "yes." But having said that, we ought to also agree that there are degrees of right, and degrees of wrong. It's wrong to insult a stranger for no reason; it's worse to punch him in the face, worse still to attack him with a weapon, even worse to murder him, and worst of all to murder a large number of people without provocation, as has been done--by Jojo Hennard in my hometown of Killeen, Texas, and by Joseph Cho at Virginia Tech. Such people are commonly called "maniacs" (or sometimes "Islamic militants"), but a better word is simply "evil".
Extreme examples, I know, but bear with me.
At the other end of the scale, there are degrees of good: it's good to give a few dollars to a needy person; better to take your own time to help him find work: better still to make a large contribution to a reputable charity, and best of all to "sell all you have and give to the poor," as some famous guy once recommended--and has been done, by Mother Teresa, Gandhi, and others. Such people are commonly called "saints".
Nobody here is either a demented mass murderer or a saint.
What's my point? Just this; we all draw the line at different places. There just aren't any simple, easy answers, even though some seem to think so.
Was it right to call the clerk's attention to the mispricing? I would say, absolutely yes. I think it would be wrong to just buy the mispriced item without at least that attempt at honesty. Was it right to go ahead and buy the item after that? I would say, no--but I would probably have done it anyway. The difference is, I wouldn't be kidding myself that I still qualified for sainthood and everything was just A-OK. It would have been a lapse; a small one, but still a lapse.
Personally, I would not have been able to live with loading up a pallet at that price. That is over MY line, and I think it was wrong. I suspect that the OP thought so too, but decided that the ethical lapse was worth the money.
We've all done it--violated our own standards--to one degree or another; the question is, how far over your own line are you willing to step? And when you do, do you have the right to pretend it was ethical? I say, you can maintain that it wasn't a BIG deal, but you should at least admit that your hands aren't sparkling clean.
There have been a couple of irrelevancies here, IMHO: first, that it's the company's mistake. That doesn't matter; knowingly taking advantage of an error is still unethical. A fair price is a fair price, and if you're not paying it, that's wrong. The question is, as I'm trying to say here, how wrong is it, and is it worth it to you to do that amount of wrong?
If you think it's no big deal, go ahead and do it, but don't pretend it's as right as insisting, at the cost of your time and money, that the store correct the error. That COULD have been done, even if you have to make the store manager get his regional manager on the phone and let you talk to him personally. Would I have done that? Probably not; but it's more likely I'd do that than clean out the store.
Second irrelevancy: that it's a "big corporation". Sorry, but portraying big corporations as fat-cat bad guys is liberal BS, and you guys should know better. Who actually owns big corporations? Who gets the profits? Sure, some of their CEOs get obscenely large salaries and bonuses--but still, the overwhelming majority of those profits go to the stockholders, who are likely to be ordinary people like you and me. In fact, the bigger the company, the more likely that is to be true; huge companies like Exxon and AT&T--and, of course, Wal-Mart--are routinely described as "widows and orphans" stocks, where small investors put their money to keep it safe. Sleazy speculators don't deal in them much; there's no quick profits there, only steady returns. So don't pretend you're "stealing from the rich". You're not.
God gave us free will, and that includes the responsibility of deciding what is right and what is wrong, and in what circumstances--and not casually, but seriously and with our souls, as it were, in our hands. In my opinion, God doesn't expect us all to be Mother Teresas--but He doesn't expect us to just grab what we can when we can, either.
Okay, so it was six cents.
