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Business Ethics Reflection

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Business Ethics Reflection

Katie Bernt
XMGT/216
November 1st, 2015
Nicole Dinan

Business Ethics Reflection

Introduction
A company I used to work for carried many different brands of high end skin care and make up. At this company, it was very important to monitor the testers that were made available for the clients to try on in the store or to take home in a small sample. Many of the brands did not distribute any or enough of their products in tester form; rather, it was common for us to have to “damage” a product out of what was called “live inventory” for use as a tester. That meant that we could take a product off of the shelf, scan it out of “live inventory”, place a tester sticker on it and use that as the tester.

When I use the term “high end” as it relates to the skin care and other products that we sold, I am talking about quality and price point. It was not uncommon to have facial serums that were $500 or more, along with fragrances that were close to $1000, and cosmetics where the average price point for a lipstick or eyes shadow was around $40.

Tester usage was not as closely monitored by the management as it should have been. The policy of the store was to use a tester until there was almost nothing left. The policy of the visual merchandising department, along with some of the brand managers in the store, was to never have a tester that was less than half full on the shelf. It is easy to see that the conflicting nature of these policies allowed for a gray area of how much of the product should actually still be present before it is replaced by another tester that came from the live inventory. In addition to the confusion regarding how full or empty a tester should be, testers were often used as prizes in departmental or storewide competitions. These contest prizes could quickly become very expensive, large in size and cost and

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