Is it ethical to sell ?Hoarders? merchandise? | The Business Ethics Blog

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By Lauren | June 27, 2012

Every once in a while, I?ll come across a product that strikes me as so utterly incongruous that I have to wonder what its producer could possibly have been thinking. Up until now, my favorite example has been magazines that primarily target women consumers. You know the sort - every issue features a new weight loss program, followed a few pages back by recipes for extravagant desserts or sugary cocktails guaranteed to blow the featured diet to smithereens. Seriously, were the departmental editors even at the same table when the issues were being laid out?

Yesterday, though, I stumbled across something that, by comparison, makes those magazines look like models of consistency. While poking around the A&E cable network?s website, I came to the page for ?Hoarders,? a show about people who compulsively stuff their homes with, well, stuff. At the top of the page I noticed a ?Shop? button and, bemused, clicked it. Up came no fewer than two dozen products associated with the show, including DVDs, books and t-shirts. It?s my understanding that hoarding is a serious mental and emotional illness, not just an interesting personal quirk. So why, oh why, would anyone want to feed the sickness by selling still more stuff associated with it?

It troubles me tremendously that cable television is becoming the modern equivalent of the 19th Century?s carnival sideshows. Flip through enough channels and you can find almost any kind of human misery packaged into a tidy one-hour reality show. It?s bad enough to turn hoarding into entertainment, still worse to use it as a platform for cheesy merchandising. Come on, A&E! Certainly you can do better.

Topics: Business Ethics, Social Ethics, corporate responsibility, customer relations, ethics |

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