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Are business ethics or profits more important?

This Debate has 18 articles on the Ethics side and 7 articles on the Profits side. Click here to see all the articles rated and ranked by Helium members.

Ethics

Profits

18 of 18

Ethics

I believe that ethics are more important to a business than profit. As a small business owner, I emphasize this with my business. Ethics equals profit in the long run. If you focus on profit alone and run an unethical business, you will lose customers and hence profit. If you emphasize good ethics, you will attract more customers and more customers means more profit. These happy customers will spread the word about your business practices and word of mouth is the best advertising yet.
The business I run is pet-sitting. It is based on the honor system. When I go into people's homes to care for their pets while they are away, I have to be honest, reliable, and trustworthy. The following is a good example: If I visited only twice a day when I was asked to come three times a day, I would be operating my business in an unethical manner. This sounds like it would be profitable in that I would certainly save on gas money and time but it would be unethical to lie to the pet owner about how many times I visited. I could probably get away with it for a short while but eventually the truth would come out and I would get caught. With my luck the neighbor would be peeking out the window and report me to the pet owner when they got home. This unethical and dishonest practice would be passed along to anyone the pet owner knew and my good reputation would quickly be ruined and no one would hire me. This with result in a loss of profit because I was unethical.
Another example is if I did not go as often as I agreed to, damage might occur. If the dog could not "hold it" for 12 hours between visits, they might relieve themselves on the carpet, thus incurring more expense (and loss on profit) in time and cleaning supplies for me to clean the mess on the carpet which could have been easily prevented had I visited as often as I agreed to do in the beginning.
Because of this, I place a heavy emphasis on ethics and it has been highly successful. My reputation is excellent and I have had to refer customers to other pet-sitters due to the high demand for my business. I will continue to place an emphasis on ethics over profit.