[s1artibartfast]

No, but it decided what goods it will sell and what it won't.

If the pizza place only offered monthly subscriptions, do you think that would make it ethical to steal a slice?

Not liking the price or product offered isn't a moral justification for stealing it.

[tsuujin]

The problem with subscriptions is that you don’t have unlimited means, which means you can only afford a certain number of subscriptions. A subscription is always more than the cost of a single purchase, so by forcing you to subscribe the company is coercing you into also choosing them for the next purchase as well.

Yeah, you can go to another pizza place to get the pepperoni that you want, but you have already subscribed to the first place and it is a nontrivial decision to not utilize the subscription you already have. Plus the new place will require you to subscribe and now you’re paying far more than the two slices would have actually cost you if you were allowed to buy by the slice.

If you want to talk ethics, pursuing exclusively a business model that is anticompetitive via a reduction in consumer choice per transaction is on the wrong side of that line. I don’t fault people for opportunistically avoiding the paywall.

[s1artibartfast]

All I'm hearing is that you don't like the price and think that justifies stealing.

[tsuujin]

Then you didn’t read what I wrote?

I don’t like anti-competitive, anti-consumer sales tactics. When that is all that is offered, I don’t blame people for finding ways around it.

What if instead every pizza place said “you must pay for five slices up front”? If you want a single slice, you have to pay for five. You get the next four without paying, but you have to buy them all up front.

Now you have purchased your five slices, but the next time you want pizza you want something that isn’t offered where you bought from last time. You can go across the street to where they have what you want, but you have to pay for five slices.

Now you have purchased ten slices and consumed two. Is that fair? What happens when you decide that the next slice you want isn’t offered at either of the two places you bought from before? Now you’ve bought fifteen slices and eaten three.

At what point do you decide to eat what you don’t really want simply because you’ve already paid for it? At some point this choice is taken away from you entirely because you can’t reasonably afford another five slices.

Subscription exclusivity in pricing is anti-consumer. They’re pushing you to consume only from them because they know you have to decide based on your means rather than purely what they offer.

[s1artibartfast]

I think I fully get what you're saying. I just don't think you have a human right or entitlement to buy pizza or news articles on the terms that you prefer.

You are right that if everyone does it you don't have a choice that allows you to get what you want for the price in terms that you want.

I don't think not being able to get your way means you get to take what you want. I don't think pizza companies individually or in aggregate have a moral obligation to satisfy you or have you as a customer.

It's like Mutual consent is only required as long as you get what you want , and if you can't get what you want, it doesn't matter. Do you apply this logic to the rest of your life?

[tsuujin]

There are laws against anti-consumer and anti-competitive practices, I’m not sure why you think we don’t have a right to purchase what we want without the market attempting to coerce us into buying from them exclusively.

I don’t need to apply this to the rest of my life because it isn’t tolerated anywhere but a few select places. I can buy my bread from a Vons and my milk from a Kroger and my meat from a butcher and we don’t allow any of those three to make it difficult to do so. I can buy a Honda motorcycle and a Ford truck and they aren’t allowed to subscription me into their brand.

Not that long ago, I could walk to a news stand and buy the journalism that I wanted case-by-case. You were allowed to “subscribe” to delivery of one but it was the delivery you were purchasing on cadence not the publication. I got to make that decision of which to buy daily, and I got to choose not to buy at all on days where I didn’t want to.

Current journalism has robbed us of these choices, and if they’re allowed to do that then I don’t see why we should be held to an ethical standard that they aren’t.

[s1artibartfast]

I think you have it all backwards, but I also don't think I'll be able to convince you of anything. There's no law preventing any of these grocery stores you talk about from selling only in bulk. They choose to sell lower volumes of their own free will.