It was a fine day in August somewhere in the Caribbean when Michelle Anne Crack decided to visit the cruise liner spa for a massage. According to Ms. Crack, the therapist in the spa offered her a facial treatment at a special price. Ms. Crack initially declined, but after a persistent sales pitch from the therapist, she agreed to the facial.
According to her report, she then signed a ticket for $29 50.
When she received the paperwork, she discovered that the price listed was $2,950.00. Ms. Crack insists that the amount was altered after she signed the agreement.
When she complained to the ship’s duty manager, he offered her a partial refund of $590. Subsequently, she wrote to the cruise company, which refunded the full price of the treatment and offered the following apology:
We’re so sorry to learn of the confusion surrounding the pricing for your Medi-Spa Service. Our company policy is to confirm the price verbally (sic) and twice in writing (on the consent form and receipt) prior to administering the service. We’re sorry to learn that this may not have happened.
We need not debate whether outright fraud is ethical, or even legal. But let’s give as much benefit of the doubt as we can.
Perhaps the therapist had no intention to deceive when quoting the price of “twenty-nine-fifty.” Perhaps Ms. Crack, assuming the treatment was worth about thirty dollars, misread the paperwork.
But even if the “confusion” really was just a case of misunderstanding, are there still ethical considerations at play?
Grapple with the Gray
List two or three reasons in defense of the therapist’s and the cruise line’s conduct.
List two or three reasons why Ms. Crack had good reason to complain.
Might the cruise line have handled the situation differently?
Having weighed the options, if you were Ms. Crack, what would you have done?
Gray Matters
If you walk into a car dealership and see a new Maserati priced at $3,000, you know something is wrong. If you see a Ford Escort priced at $300,000, you know something is wrong. There are certain expectations based on common knowledge which, if unmet, set alarms ringing in the mind of any typical buyer. It then becomes the ethical responsibility of the seller to explain the inconsistency.
A specially priced facial treatment on a $3,000 cruise has no business costing $3,000. If it does, it had better be something extraordinary, and whatever makes it special had better be presented in large font and bold type, as should the price tag.
In this case, there should have been no room for misunderstanding. Indeed, the hard-sell tactics Ms. Clark claimed she was subjected to are of dubious morality under any circumstance. But as a passenger on a name-brand luxury cruise line, Ms. Clark had no reason to suspect that she would be manipulated into signing away a month’s pay when she walked into the spa and asked for a massage.
Almost as bad was the cruise line’s classic non-apology apology for regretting the “confusion surrounding the pricing.” When a customer feels—all the more so for good reason—that a vendor has acted in bad faith, that’s the time for the vendor to not only offer a hasty and sincere apology but go the extra mile by appeasing the customer and demonstrating that the same bad faith will never be visited on any other customers in the future.