The Ethics of Pilferage

Usually when I want to start an ethics post I have to come up with a scenario on my own. But given the subject of this one, I kind of wanted to rip off somebody else’s article on the ethics involved in stealing from hotels you stay in, and I was most gratified to see that CNN Online had already written on this subject. Of course, I’m not going to plagiarize anything they actually wrote; that would be obviously wrong as well as illegal. And I’m not going to pretend that any of their thoughts or conclusions were my own; I actually had been planning a post on this topic, but even if I hadn’t been, I’m not going to start stealing other people’s work. One could argue, in fact, that by correctly attributing this article AND linking to the CNN site, I’m actually helping them to promote their own business, and this article in particular. Which is kind of the point, here…

Most of the stuff that you see in your hotel room – and nearly all of the things that you could easily conceal in your luggage – has been chosen with an eye to either being cheap to replace or serving as advertising for the hotel, or both. All of the toilet articles (soap, shampoo, lotion, etc.), to take the obvious example, have been acquired in bulk and then provided to you in packaging with the hotel’s name and logo all over it. If any of it makes you or anyone else even slightly more likely to stay in that hotel again, this stuff will have paid for several metric tons of itself, not to mention the fact that it was a legitimate operating expense (and therefore deductible) in the first place. This extends to ashtrays (if your room still has any), pens, note pads, glassware, or anything else with a logo on it; none of it costs much and all of it has advertising value…

Furniture, of course, it not intended to be taken as part of the advertising program, and most of it will be difficult enough to walk off with that most guests won’t bother – although I’ve witnessed cases of people trying to check out with flat-screen television sets and occasional room furnishings. Hotel security will take a dim view of that, and management may decide to bill the guests for the pilfered items, assuming they can prove who took them. Linens are the best-known gray area; some facilities have no problem with guests helping themselves to an occasional towel, and some will go so far as to provide monogrammed bathrobes for really good customers – in which case you can be sure the company has made enough off of those customers to afford this minor perk. But hotels further down the food chain will try to prevent people from stealing their towels, and may actually bill you if you try…

Which brings me to our ethics question for this week. If some of the objects in your hotel room have logos and will actually benefit your hosts if you take them and let other people see them, do you have any responsibility to do that? Do you owe it to the hotel (and its owners) to help promote their business? On the other side of the issue, if you’ve just shelled out the equivalent of a month’s rent to stay somewhere, does your hotel have any responsibility to help you afford your stay by lowering your expenditures for soap or linens? Especially since they will be able to write those items off on their taxes anyway? If you pay your taxes, and some of those taxes are used to subsidize hotel-room items (in the form of tax deductions), does that entitle you to a piece of the action? And, most importantly, should the hotel provide a list of things that are okay to take from your room (or label things “complimentary” and “please don’t steal this”), just to eliminate the gray area? If they don’t, is it really your fault if you can’t tell the difference?

It’s worth thinking about…