An Ethical Consumption of Hotdogs

An Ethical Consumption of Hotdogs

GT
gt814529@oio.edu

Information and news moves pretty fast through the digital streams of social media and mobile communication. Posts, messages, pictures come up in a blink of an eye, and can refresh again with a whole fresh bevy of information. Yet when one stops to gather water from this stream, one has to be careful what they fish out. It’s not always a prize winning ten-pound bass.

When looking into advertising and public relations, information shared here can often be involved with selling something or endorsing a product, company or organization. Several ethics codes for both PR and Advertising have come up as a way to demonstrate a set of best practices and guidelines that ensures information is honest, accurate, and given the surrounding context so that those seeing the messages get the full picture. As the Principles and Practices of Advertising Ethics states, clearly disclosing all conditions, such as payments or free products, is integral to fully inform of any biases; which, have become very prevalent in their use, of say, a product review mentioning if they receive an item for free, or a video clearly noting if it is sponsored. And the PRSA Code goes into great detail about the Free Flow of Information, and how it is important to serve both the public interest and the organizations one is representing, reflecting the codes of other media outlets. All in all, these seem to be implemented into practice quite frequently, and seem to be largely on the up-and-up.

To double back for a moment, it was serendipitous that we were talking about this topic this week, as there was an interesting story I saw as it was developing.

On May 18, 2022, a post on Twitter announced that Costco’s infamous $1.50 hotdogs would be raising their prices. If you’re familiar, raising the prices of the hotdogs has been a non-starter ultimatum for Costco in the past. So take that to mean that everyone freaked out when they heard it. A handful of genuine publications ran with the story, along with many people retweeting it, including several blue check marked accounts, the brass rings of information verification. Even the official GOP twitter retweeted it, adding to the reach and volume of the rumor, and continually giving it to some form of validity.

Only for it to turn out to be a false rumor. The hotdogs would not be changing in price. However the stock price of Costco in fact did, as it dropped about 12.5% (of a billion dollar company) due to people speculatively believing that this was in fact true. As of the time of me writing, the stock has still not recovered that, going from $490 a share to around $415 a share.

Mel Magazine

It’s a bit of unchained level of negligence that ran wild every step of the process, where it feels that no one really tried to curb the momentum of it. It got so far that the story had some sort of tangible effects. And while it did eventually halt and someone did check, the effects are still continuing up until now, if one wanted to purchase stock in Costco.

It’s an example of how, though ethical codes are out there, at times, things can seemingly traipse right past them. The speed at which it escalated at, and the verification that omitted, was a potent combination win letting it get away from the facts. That none of it was even happening.