Jeffrey L. Seglin's Blog, page 67

Signs of our times

Banner honoring Martin Richard's words hanging over Route 93 in Boston. Designed by Liz Carney of Dot Art and created by neighborhood children and volunteers in Savin Hill area.


It's been an eventful few weeks in Boston.
The Boston Marathon, typically a celebratory event, was met with terror and tragedy. Just days later, people in the city and surrounding municipalities were voluntarily "sheltering in place" as law enforcement worked to find the men suspected of placing and detonating the bombs that killed and maimed.
Soon after the identities of the three people killed by the bomb blast were made known, photos of Martin Richard, the young boy from my part of Boston who died in one of the blasts, were shown with him holding a sign with the words, "No more hurting people" and "Peace."
An artist who runs a children's arts program in our community came up with the idea to have neighborhood children work on a banner featuring Martin's words. The plan was to paint the 85-foot banner on recycled acrylic wallpaper and then hang it from a bridge overlooking a highway that leads into Boston. Hundreds of kids showed up to paint on the Saturday after police caught the suspect. Adults showed up to help.
Early on Sunday morning, the artist emailed me to ask if she could give me a call. She told me she was concerned because she had not obtained a permit from the city of Boston to hang the banner. I reassured her that it was unlikely anyone would question the spirit of the banner or request that it be taken down for lack of a permit, but I suggested she call our district city councilor.
To ask him to secure a permit for us? she asked.
No, I responded, to ask him to come help us.
I figured that if our city councilor were involved in hanging the sign, the chances of the city taking it down were less likely.
Given that we still had no permit to hang the sign, was this the right thing to do?
If we had been asked to take the sign down, I certainly would have assisted in doing so (we didn't actually know if we needed a permit, although Boston being Boston, we assumed we did), but in this case, it seemed wise to heed the advice I first heard spoken years ago by Adm. Grace Hopper: "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."

As our artist friend stayed and painted with the children, a 12-year-old boy from the neighborhood, our city councilor and my wife and I walked up to the bridge to start attaching the unwieldy banner. As we struggled to keep it in place by attaching it to the bridge by using zip ties, other neighbors began stopping to help hold it in place. Soon, there were more than a couple dozen people attaching the sign.

Photos of the effort, including our city councilor affixing the banner to the bridge, were posted to Facebook. People shared images of the sign itself more than 3,800 times, often with messages of appreciation after having seen it while driving into the city.

No one asked where the permit was to hang the banner. No one asked that it be taken down. The response was just appreciation from people for seeing the words from a little boy asking people to do the right thing. 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . 

Follow him on Twitter: @jseglinhttps://twitter.com/jseglin 

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  

(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Sweeping others' mistakes under the rug

Computers make mistakes. Let me rephrase that a bit: If incorrect information is put into a computer by a human being, then that computer is likely to make a mistake in computing whatever it is supposed to be computing. Garbage in, garbage out, goes the saying.
It's a customer's responsibility to point out an error at the cash register if a product is clearly scanned incorrectly. Some stores, like a supermarket we wrote about recently, have a policy of honoring an incorrectly scanned price if it results from their mistake. But other times, it's the customer's responsibility to fork over the amount he or she had intended to pay but that rang up cheaper.
Just as you wouldn't believe it to be OK to keep $1,000 from a bank's ATM when your intent was to get $100 and the withdrawal record only shows $100, you shouldn't think it's OK to keep a $129.95 waffle maker if you end up being charged for a $9.95 oven mitt at the cash register and the receipt only shows $9.95.
With some degree of pleasure, a neighbor told me that he had been undercharged for a small rug recently at a discount store when it scanned as a cheaper product. My neighbor knows what I write for a living and he prefaced his story by telling me he had "an ethical thing" happen recently.
Before I could respond that I thought he should have pointed out the discrepancy to the clerk at the cash register, though, he continued with his story -- and explained that because the rug is for a high-traffic area, he was concerned it would wear out quickly. Fearing that the store might stop carrying this rug that fit perfectly in the spot he needed to cover, and also wanting to seize the opportunity to get a deal if the rugs remained incorrectly priced, he returned to the store. He picked out three more rugs and brought then to the checkout, where the clerk proceeded to ring up his order.
That's when my neighbor noticed that the same incorrect price showed up again on the register. What he didn't notice until he was out the door and heading to his car was that the clerk had charged him for one rug, not three.
He thought about returning to report the mistake, but decided not to, figuring that if the store was so careless as to not get its prices right and a clerk so inattentive that he didn't charge for all items, the fault was not his but theirs.
He's right, of course. It was their fault. If the store wants to stay in business for the long run, it would be wise to have its employees do a better job of charging its customers the right amount.
But my neighbor was wrong not to point out the incorrect scan and uncharged-for rugs -- not because the clerk might get in trouble and not because the store might go out of business if enough customers take advantage of such mistakes, but because that would have been the right thing to do.
Getting a deal is fine. Getting the deal when you know it's built on someone else's unintended mistake is not. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglinhttps://twitter.com/jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Who were you again?

How do you manage social media accounts without bruising the feelings of others online?
That's the question posed by a relative latecomer to social media, a 50-something reader from California who writes that he was "very reluctant to join Facebook," but that he finally did and "must say that I do enjoy it."
Like many people, this fellow has tried to manage his friends list by limiting it to those with whom he "had a pleasant association with at one time or another." Occasionally, however, he will get an invitation to be friends from someone whose name he recognizes but remembers nothing more about the person or any relationship with him or her, or someone whose name does "not ring a bell in any way."
While he has no problem not responding to those whose names do not ring a bell, he feels it may be wrong to not respond to others he's sure he must have known at one time or another, but simply can't remember.
"I do not want to hurt the feelings of anyone," he writes, "but I also want to keep my friend list limited to those people I at least remember. Is there an answer to this quandary?"
Since being launched in February 2004, initially as a site that was primarily targeted at students at specific colleges, then anyone with a college email address, and soon anyone at all, Facebook has grown from a self-reported 1 million users by the end of 2004 to more than 1 billion users in 2012. With that many people hooked into the site, each of us is bound to know someone well who's on Facebook and we're also bound to have lots of old sort-of acquaintances we don't really remember out there as well.
There's nothing unethical about going on or staying off of Facebook or any other social media site. For those of us who are on such sites where it's easy to lose several hours in tracking newsfeed updates or monitoring tweets, I am sure we share days where the thought of getting off of everything and resorting to anonymity is mighty appealing.
There is also nothing unethical about not accepting every friend request that comes your way. The beauty of such social media sites and free will is that you can choose to keep your circle of connections as small or as large as you desire.
If the reader from California wants to set a rule that he only accepts friend requests from people he can remember, then the right thing to do is to stick to that rule.
If he's curious about those names that seem familiar but he can't remember, then a right thing to do would be to simply send a message in response to the friend request asking the person if he or she can remind him how they know one another. While some requesters might take offense at having to be asked such a question, especially if they remember my reader far better than he remembers them, it's the right thing to do if my reader really wants to connect only to those people with whom he has had some past connection. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglinhttps://twitter.com/jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

They get it wrong, you get it free

B.F., a reader who lives just outside of Columbus, Ohio, has a disagreement with his wife. He has encountered "a pricing situation" at his grocery store.
The story offers a scan guarantee. If an item scans at the cash register for a different price than what is displayed on the shelf, the item is free as long as it doesn't cost more than $5.
As a "frugal customer," B.F. pays close attention to the prices of groceries when he and his wife shop. After benefiting from one of these scanning mistakes, his casher remarked: "We left last week's sales price up." But the price that scanned had reverted to the non-sales price. The cashier honored the guarantee and gave B.F. the item without charge.
Since that incident, B.F. has noticed that the sales prices listed on the shelves include in small print the date of expiration on them. "These signs with the sales price are almost always taken down after the expiration date," he writes.
Typically, because of his frugality, when B.F. is searching for a particular grocery item that has several variations or brands, he almost always picks the cheapest item. But since that first scan-wrong-and-get-it-free encounter, he now looks for items that had old sales tags up on the shelf. He verifies that they are old and are likely to scan at a higher price than the sales price posted by looking at the expiration date on the signs.
"I pick this item, even though it is not always the cheapest price, knowing I will get it for free under the store's guarantee," he writes. "I do not stock up on these items, nor do I deliberately seek out free items that I wouldn't have purchased anyway."
B.F.'s wife believes it is unethical for him to purchase these particular brands knowing that they will be free, if he would have otherwise made another choice based on the displayed price. But B.F. believes that this is part of the reason the policy is in place. "The store is, in effect, compensating me a few dollars' worth of free groceries for alerting it to its mistake, which it can then fix for future consumers," he writes, asking: "What is the right thing?"
Technically, I suppose, the store has a legal right to claim that by posting the expiration date on the sales signs, it is not obligated to pay out on these items that have reverted to their pre-sale prices. But the spirit of the scan guarantee seems to suggest that if any pricing sign is up and wrong, regardless of the small print, then it will honor the guarantee.
Even though he claims not to go looking for free items that he wouldn't have been purchasing anyway, I'm not convinced this matters. His attempt to avail himself of the guarantee doesn't strike me as somehow being sullied by premeditated attempts to scope out wayward sales signs that should have been taken down when the sale ended. If the store didn't want customers like B.F. to figure out how to score some free less-than-$5 groceries, it shouldn't have set up the guarantee in the first place.
The right thing is for the store to do a better job of keeping its signage current and to honor its guarantee for as long as it is in place. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglinhttps://twitter.com/jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

How we use the words we do

Ignatz Krauss

How obligated are we to make sure that our actions or words don't offend others, particularly those to whom we are closest? Even when we give it our best shot to be thoughtful, how responsible are we if our positive intentions yield an unexpected negative response?
Almost 19 years ago, I was part of a team of writers and editors who launched a technology magazine. As editor, I was tasked with writing a note to readers about what we were trying to accomplish.
In a series of articles in the first issue, we tried to address how technology has changed our lives. To serve as a counter to all of the change, I started my note to readers with a look at how my great-grandfather, Ignatz Krauss, might have found his job as a motorman for the New York City subway system, originally built in 1904, little changed in 1994, when it remained decidedly low tech.
One exception I noted was that back in Ignatz's day, he and others running the trains may have used a "motorman's friend," a rubber urinal that motormen strapped to their legs under their pants. I noted that while the technology of e trains had changed little in decades that this bit of low-tech equipment had likely been long replaced -- perhaps in part by stronger regulations about how long a motorman's shift could last.
I never knew my great-grandparents nor my grandparents. Ignatz's youngest daughter, my great aunt, was still alive then and I knew her well. I was never in regular contact with her, but saw her at occasional family outings. She served as the maid of honor at my sister's wedding. I had thought that mentioning her father and featuring a photo of him in suit and bowler hat would be a nice tribute to a family member I had never known.
The article appeared and my great aunt said nothing. She did, however, tell my father that she was appalled and embarrassed that I would choose to mention her father's use of a urinal in a national magazine. Here I thought it would be a nice surprise for my great aunt and other family members to see Ignatz cited as an example of someone whose use of technology represented enduring values of ingenuity and hard work.
But upon reflection, I realize that the bit about the urinal tied to his leg could have been a bit too personal of a detail for my great aunt's sensibilities.
So what was the right thing to do? Should I have cleared my reference with my great aunt ahead of time? Perhaps that would have been a kind gesture.
But then where do we stop in double-checking our actions or words before we use them? If we worry so much about offending or being inappropriate, we run the risk of never saying, writing, or doing anything.
The right thing is to try our best to be as thoughtful as we can about how we choose to do what we do and recognize that we cannot anticipate every reaction to our actions. We should never allow fear of potential responses to keep us from doing whatever it is we're trying to do in the best way we can in the time we have allotted to do it. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglinhttps://twitter.com/jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Is haggling over price sometimes wrong?

In early March, a California reader returned from a trip to Uganda to visit the mountain gorillas there. Her tour was quite expensive. She traveled with many of the same people on this tour, most of whom travel throughout the world at least once a year, if not more.
While in Uganda, they visited the Batwa people at a small demonstration village they have established in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.
"In a country where many adults earn less than one dollar a day, the Batwa are considered much more impoverished," she writes. "Many of the children we saw appeared malnourished. All children and adults were very, very thin."
The Batwa people had displayed an array of handmade items for the tourists to purchase, including beaded jewelry, wood carvings and handmade baskets. "All prices were well below what would be charged in a village shop or in a U.S. fair trade business," my reader writes.
But she takes issue with the fact that several of her fellow travelers insisted on bargaining down the Batwa peoples to half the price they were charging for their goods or less. "One Batwa woman was asking the equivalent of $7.20 for a lovely hand-woven tray," my reader writes. "She was offered and accepted $3.60.
After she raised her concern about negotiating the prices down on the goods being sold one of the women on the trip with whom she had traveled before explained to my reader: "They love to bargain and expect to come down in price. They'd be very hurt if you didn't bargain and they'd think you were stupid."
My reader responded: "Sure, they'd rather get half the amount than have the money to feed their kids or to purchase firewood for cooking. I don't care if they think I'm stupid." She reports that the conversation went downhill from there.
Later in their tour, their tour leader who -- a biologist who has spent a good deal of time in Africa -- thanked her for paying the asking price for the goods offered.
"Was I wrong?" my reader asks about paying the asking price rather than negotiating -- and raising the issue with her fellow travelers.
My reader wasn't wrong to pay full price. She also wasn't wrong to raise the conversation with her fellow travelers about the ethics of negotiating already low prices down with people who seemed like they could use the money. They each saw similar situations in the village and could determine whether it was appropriate to haggle or not. That my reader chose to pay full price in an effort to pay what she deemed to be a fair price for the goods received is laudable.
What's curious, however, is that no one on the trip, such as the tour leader who had spent a good deal of time in the region, saw fit to give the tourists guidance. That she thanked my reader for paying for full price suggests the tour guide had an opinion on the right thing to do in the situation. The right thing would have been for her to share that opinion with the tourists she led through the marketplace. The choices they made based on that opinion would have been entirely theirs to make. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglinhttps://twitter.com/jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Should airline passengers be charged by weight?

Appeared on HuffPost Live on Friday, March 29, to discuss Norwegian economist's suggestion that passengers pay airlines based on their weight:
 

A. Pawlowski writes about the issue on NBCnews.com: "Should Fat Fliers Pay More?"

Hosted by: Josh Zepps
Guests:
Jesse Ziglar (Hollywood Beach, FL) Aviation blogger
Elizabeth A. Hoppe, Ph.D. (Seattle, WA) Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lewis University; Editor of Ethical Issues In Aviation
Jeffrey Seglin @jseglin (Cambridge, MA) Writer of "The Right Thing" Ethics Column
Rick Seaney (Dallas, TX) Air Travel Analyst at FareCompare.com
Victor Matheson (Worcester, MA) Associate Professor Of Economics, College Of The Holy Cross

I sure can't help you

My wife's smartphone was stolen last week. Suspending the number on that stolen phone so no one else could use it was simple enough.
But since she uses the phone as her primary work phone, it was important for her to get another phone set up with the same number as soon as possible. A quick call and a long wait on hold with our cellphone service provider got us to a service representative who wanted to help us. We told him the situation and asked how much it would cost to buy a replacement phone.
"$649," he said.
We pointed out that we were three weeks away from being eligible for an every two-year upgrade at a discounted price. He pointed out that the same phone would cost $199 in three weeks.
Pointing out to him that the only reason a new phone was needed was because the old one had been stolen resulted in a lecture about how they could not make exceptions because their contract with the phone's manufacturer could be canceled if they did.
We hung up and hunted around to see if we had an old phone lying around the house that my wife could have her cell phone number transferred to for three weeks while we waited. Having successfully found a very old phone, we called our cellphone service provider back to ask about the temporary switch. My wife would have to wait the three weeks to be able to have her contacts switched over since it was a very old nonsmart phone. But saving the $450 seemed worth the three-week wait.
When a different service representative answered, we told her what we wanted to do.
"Why do you want to do that?" she asked.
We explained that even though the phone had been stolen, that we have been customers for years, and that we were willing to sign on for another two years and three weeks if need be, we were told we had to wait until we were eligible for an upgrade and didn't want to spend an extra $450.
"We can do better than that," she said. And then she proceeded to move up my wife's eligibility date so we could qualify for the lower price.
No talk of concern about the phone manufacturer canceling the relationship. No questioning of any sort. She heard what had happened and responded by trying to provide service to a customer in need. She even texted us to make sure the phone had arrived and was working.
So who did the right thing? The first representative who claimed nothing could be done? Or the second who worked to find a solution?
Customers should not have to resort to asking to speak to a manager when a service representative refuses to try to solve an issue. And it shouldn't take repeated calls to different service representatives to hope one among them might be amenable to resolving an issue.
It falls on companies -- cellphone companies, banks, credit card companies, cable television companies -- to empower their employees to do what's right by the customer as long as it doesn't cheat the company. That's both the right thing to do and a good business decision if companies don't want their customers to take their business elsewhere. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Return to sender, please, return to sender already

B.P., a reader from Ohio, moved into his house more than four years ago. Even after four years, however, he continues to receive mail addressed to the house's former owner. The occasional junk mail addressed to the previous occupant he doesn't mind. He can simply toss that out. But he's still receiving first-class mail containing financial and retirement statements from a mutual fund company addressed to the former owner.
"I am asking you for guidance on what is the right thing to do," writes B.P.
B.P. doesn't know the former owner. He had already packed up and moved to Missouri a few months before B.P. moved in. B.P. had heard he moved there for a new job. For a while, the former owner's mail was appropriately forwarded by the post office, but that no longer seems to be happening.
So B.P. started writing "Return to Sender-Does Not Live Here" and placed the former owner's mail in his outgoing mail.
But the mail kept coming. And B.P. kept returning it. About two years ago, he called the mutual fund company to let them know that the person they were trying to reach no longer lived at the address.
He's told his letter carrier that the addressee hasn't lived there in years. The carrier acknowledged that the mail should not be delivered and told B.P. he would issue a stop notice so it wouldn't be delivered again.
The mail kept coming.
Two weeks ago, B.P. emailed the mutual fund company again and was thanked in a return email by what he believes was an "actual human being" and assured that they would forward the issue onto the "privacy team."
He's since received another piece of mail address to the former owner.
"Maybe I am getting grumpy in my ripe old age of 38, but I feel that it isn't my responsibility anymore to fix what others are not taking responsibility for. When is enough, enough?" he asks. "What is the right thing to do?"
B.P. has gone above and beyond what most people would conclude was a reasonable effort to get this mail situation straightened out. But if it's first-class mail, simply chucking it in the trash is not the right thing to do. It's hardly more difficult to stick it back in the outgoing mail than it is to toss it in the trash -- more frustrating perhaps, but still the right thing to do.
The responsibility is on the former owner to notify the mutual fund company that his address has changed. Short of that, the company should honor its commitment to change the address from his former Ohio home to his new place in Missouri. And the post office should stop delivering mail to an address it knows is incorrect.
Each of these things should happen. But B.P.'s patience is wearing thin because the right thing is not happening. In the meantime, the right thing for him is to continue to return the mail and hope that one day soon it will find its direct way to its intended recipient. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Day-old food takes on a new life

I love this idea. Dough Rauch, the former president of Trader Joe's, is launching a new business built around selling food that has passed its official sell-by date but is still perfectly consumable. The idea is to make quality food available to people who otherwise might not be able to afford it.
The Department of Agriculture estimates that $47 billionof food is wasted by retailers in the U.S. every year.
Rauch's Urban Food Initiative plans to launch a 10,000-square-foot store in a neighborhood in Boston where many low-income families live. If the goal is to reach lower-income families with affordable foods, that seems to make sense, at least on the surface.
A big challenge, however, is whether lower-income people will warm up to a store if the perception is that they're buying castoffs from more well-to-do customers. A hairstylist working in the same neighborhood toldThe Boston Globe that Dorchester does not need food that others consider undesirable.
But what if, instead of putting these markets solely in low-income neighborhoods, Urban Food Initiative tried to locate them in areas where a broader cross-section of the population lived and shopped?
That seems to be the model used by Ron Shaich, the CEO of Panera Bread, when he launched PaneraCares, a nonprofit offshoot of his public bakery company that is built on the premise of customers paying what they can afford for food. Each PaneraCares is a full-service cafe just like Panera Bread, but instead of a cash register, there's a donation box.
Some of the food at PaneraCares comes from unsold goods at the for-profit cafe. But just like the food that's passed its sell-by date, the food is still healthy and safe for consumption.
Rather than locate the PaneraCares cafes in low-income neighborhoods, part of the company's mission is to locate in areas that are economically diverse. Ostensibly, there's a practical business reason behind this since the premise is that those who can afford to pay will, while those who can't might pay less or nothing at all.
"We can't sustain it if we go to a neighborhood where there are only poor folk," Shaich told a TEDx conference in St. Louis when the nonprofit was launched.
But another consequence of locating in areas that lower-income and higher-income people might frequent is that the stigma of buying someone else's castoffs is softened. It becomes, as Shaich told his TEDx audience, "a cafe of shared responsibility."
On average, Shaich says PaneraCares takes in about 80 percent of what the full retail price on items would be. He suggests that that's enough to sustain the effort and open new stores.
I love the idea of lowering the amount of food that retailers waste every year. And when hunger remains pervasive among families, launching efforts like the Urban Food Initiative and PaneraCares suggests how strong entrepreneurs like Rauch and Shaich can truly effect change.
If the ultimate desire is to help the poor with such initiatives, however, then the right thing is to try to do them in a way that doesn't stigmatize the poor, but instead emboldens dignity with efforts that attract all segments of the economy. When the Urban Food Initiative opens, I hope to be among the first to shop there, and I hope others of all levels of income follow. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . 
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.