What are the ethics of accepting a windfall of cash at someone’s expense? Employee accepts coworker’s husband’s trading card collection and sells it for profit, creates HR issue when he finds out and she demands it back: ‘[I told her] it’s too late’ – FAIL Blog

Do you remember those “useless bits of cardboard” that we were all told by our parents as kids were garbage and pointless to collect? Well, as it turns out, as long as those bits of cardboard were properly cared for and stored, they’re now extremely valuable. Thanks to the scarcity of supply offered by time and demand offered by streamers, and other internet content creators who host pack openings and box openings in which they essentially gamble the high cost of a sealed pack for the slight chance at cards that could be worth thousands.

With the colorful visual suspense of the pack opening, and the slow flick through the cards until they get to the rares at the end of the pack, which builds constant suspense, these videos make for consistent videos with long engagement times that do well with algorithms on many platforms.

I think this all begs the question of the ethics of getting a “deal” that you know is disadvantageous to the other party. This might be I think there reaches. You can’t, ethically or honestly, accept a windfall of cash or a priceless item from another person. You see this all the time in reality TV and other media, the old “He didn’t know what he had” type of story, where someone describes how they essentially swindled a priceless item off of an unsuspecting older person.

Guitar collectors are an example that comes to mind for me, where even the wealthiest successful musicians and private collectors proudly with a puffed chest and swaggering bravado describe how they got their most priceless guitars (worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars) for pennies on the dollar from some old lady somewhere who was selling her late husband’s instruments. These stories are usually told with a grin and a laugh that makes your stomach churn when you actually take a moment to reflect on the implications.

There’s a certain “dog eat dog” and “that’s the way of the world if you want to make” type of hustler gridset that comes into plays here that is highly unethical and basically has a synonymous baseline where you might as well have just picked the person’s pocket, just so long as they didn’t notice that you had your hand in there.

So what am I saying here? Well, the employee, regardless of how many times he asked if she was “Sure” that he could have them, had an obligation here to tell his coworker how much the cards were worth before going off and selling them for profit. Similarly, he could have offered a percentage of the proceeds back to her when he started selling them. 

I’ll tell you what, I definitely would not have accepted the item, then gone and sold it immediately, and spent the money on myself. I just wouldn’t have ever done that.

I think this is a situation where everyone is wrong except for the poor guy who lost his card collection, which was probably worth even more to him than the dollar amount in sentimental value. As a guy who is highly sentimental and nostalgic about his stuff. There’s no way of reassembling that collection in any way that would resemble its original shape. And doing this to a loved one, giving away their things behind their back, is a somewhat unforgivable act of betrayal.