Morality doesn't come into it. It's business. They're trying to get as much money out of you as they can, and you're trying to save as much money as you can. If their business model involves them giving out free advice, then fine. That's their risk. Sometimes it will get them more sales, sometimes it will waste their time.
This is modern business mantra in a nutshell. It's sad. When it comes to implementation, business interactions involve people. If those people want to be dicks and say, "It's business," that's their prerogative. We're all sharing an existence on a small planet in the middle of a huge void, and many would apparently prefer inventing silly definitions to justify sociopathic behavior as opposed to helping one another.
I had a sad vision of the future while reading the article, one in which business no longer involves human interaction of any kind. Instead, we're all just browsing virtual stores, ordering items that will be packaged and shipped to us by people and robots working in factories. There will be no more traditional sales or customer assistance jobs. Some may consider this an improvement, but I don't.
When I go pick up boxed merchandise from a store like Best Buy or Target, there's nothing the clerk is doing that couldn't have been done by a vending machine. It wastes a human being's intelligence to keep them in a dead-end poverty-level job like that, and we're only doing it because we haven't really figured out how to deal humanely with our huge labor surplus.
When I want advice, I'll seek it out from people who don't have huge conflicts of interest around what I do or don't choose to buy.
> I had a sad vision of the future while reading the article, one in which business no longer involves human interaction of any kind. Instead, we're all just browsing virtual stores, ordering items that will be packaged and shipped to us by people and robots working in factories. There will be no more traditional sales or customer assistance jobs. Some may consider this an improvement, but I don't.
The future is now, so to speak. Sure, there are still knowledgeable people in mom-and-pop brick-and-mortar stores, but most people already choose to shop at big box stores. I don't trust the salespeople at those big box stores to be knowledgeable and unbiased, and I doubt other shoppers do either.
Discerning shoppers already research their choices on the web before (maybe) looking to buy something at a local store. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Sure, you are no longer interacting with a salesperson at your local store. However, this is expensive -- a fact you pay for through higher prices -- in comparison to getting a recommendation from someone you trust, be that a blogger or someone you know from physical interaction (who may have gotten their recommendation from a blogger). Reading a blogger's review or roundup is not a physical interaction, but it's still a human interaction.
