“Your dirty pans, sir…just as you ordered them!”
Normally I wouldn’t post about the practices of a U.K. company, since there are already too many U.S. stories involving ethics for me to keep up with. The innovation added to the world of deception by Housebites, however, has United States written all over it, and I predict it will travel across the pond in about a minute and a half.
The British company will not only cook and deliver a gourmet meal to order for your dinner party or romantic evening…it will deliver dirty pots and pans, to give your claims of hard labor in the kitchen that extra believability. From the company’s press release:
“Housebites.com, the takeaway service that delivers restaurant quality food has today announced a service called ‘pretend you cooked’ that allows customers to pretend they have slaved away at a hot stove more convincingly by delivering dirty pans alongside the food. Cooked by a professional chef and delivered to your door, Housebites main courses cost on average between £10 and £12, and now for an additional £5, customers can request the pans used to cook them for added authenticity. Collection of the pans is then arranged as easily as the original delivery slot.”
How nice.
Nothing expresses respect, love and trust for your guests like lying through your teeth to them. Such a meal will go beautifully with the Picasso copies on your wall that you represent as originals, the fake Yale diploma hanging in the bathroom, and the names of prominent celebrities you drop in the lively conversation, as if you are their confidante, rather than an utter stranger.
Lying to friends and associates to make you look more accomplished and industrious than you are is a bad habit, and an early sign of character rot. Paying companies to help you lie more effectively is an indication that your ethics break-down is heading toward catastrophic levels.
As for Housebites: I know their rationalization by heart. It’s the mantra I hear from term paper mills and escort services: “we’re doing nothing unethical. If our customers lie or cheat, that’s their responsibility. We just provide a service”
Right. All Housebites does is take people’s worse instincts and make money by encouraging them to act on them. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?
Of course there is.
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Sources:
Graphic: Short List
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Ethics Alarms 
How crazy. It reads like something out of the Onion. Clients could just as easily put their own pans in the dish rack, if they wanted to fool people – not that I’m recommending it, I’m just saying that the service seems awfully complicated. A load of dirty pans delivered? Ew…I never sit down to dinner with dirty pans in the kitchen, so I find this sort of gross. If these people’s guests know them well enough, they won’t fall for it anyway…someone who carries nothing but a P&J sandwich or cup ramen daily to work, a secret gourmet chef by night? I wouldn’t buy it. People who cook that well talk about food, are interested in it. The sudden appearance of a gourmet meal isn’t enough to fool people, I don’t think.
What do they do when asked by guests how they made a dish, or what ingredients comprise a sauce? Don’t tell me the meals come with Cliff’s Notes! 😀
That’s IT! The missing piece! Gourmet Cliff’s Notes! Brilliant!
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Can’t you just imagine panic setting in with ‘This is marvelous! Do give me your recipe!’
They’d have to have pronunciation cues for the French phrases though 😀
It’s another “I Love Lucy” episode. Clearly, people aren’t watching classic sitcoms, getting neighbors to pretend to be their butlers and maids when old classmates visit, and encountering disaster.
Isn’t it enough that a host will pay top dollar for a professionally made gourmet dinner for his guests? If, for some unknown reason, you want to impress friends and associates with your alleged culinary talents, then LEARN them on your own. Otherwise, you will eventually be caught in your own web of lies (such as when they learn about Housebites!) and spotted for the phony that you are. After all, how many people expect to be entertained by a gourmet chef? Cheap, social climbing jerks!
‘It’s another “I Love Lucy” episode.’
Yes, and OMG I was always on tenterhooks hoping Lucy wouldn’t be found out, whatever her she was up to…I can picture people across Britain with their hearts in their mouths hoping no one asks for a cooking lesson,..
Shouldn’t laugh as I type, pardon my typos…this has just struck me as awfully funny, a disaster in the making…
Don’t you guys recognize a good PR gag when you see one?
There are lots of catering services out there. How do you gain recognition for YOURS with (free) news coverage? Gee, how about coming up with an additional service… something clever and silly that just about NOBODY will ever actually purchase, but is sufficiently zany to push the story into man-bites-dog territory?
If you find PR stunts unethical, prima facie, then this is unethical. Otherwise, it’s just clever marketing. Personally, I think this one is the latter (and I DO think a lot of PR stunts are unethical).
If people buy it, it’s a service. If they don’t, it becomes a PR stunt. This isn’t very far from equally absurd lie-assisting services, like the one that provides appropriate background sounds (busy airports, hospitals) to bolster lie to one’s boos about why you can’t go to work. It never occurred to me that the service might be a fake, and I’ve been a marketer too. Seems strange to say that lying about a service that helps lying is more honest that telling the truth about one. The mind reels…
What lie? Assuming I’m correct, I’ve absolutely no doubt that the caterer WILL deliver dirty pots and pans if requested to do so. And a handful of morons might actually request same. But I strongly doubt that they expect to do so very often, and it strikes me that the real goal is to raise visibility for the food (not the cookware) by doing something goofy enough to get the blogosphere going. And it’s apparently working, at least to an extent – they’ve been picked up by The Guardian, the Huffington Post, and YOU.
Creating harmless dudgeon and controversy can be a smart marketing tactic. I recall a few years back, a chain of gyms out on the west coast put up billboards around their market area. The billboards featured an image of a terrifying-looking alien emerging from a spaceship, along with the caption “When they come, they’ll eat the fat ones first.”
The billboards almost immediately drew the ire of activist groups “representing” the… well, those whose height and weight were not in optimal proportion. It became a national oddball news item that bubbled along nicely for about a week. Then the chain got a second juicy bite at the apple by announcing they were going to take the billboards down and replace them with something else.
Cost? Essentially, the costs of the creative, production of the art for the alien billboards (they used those billboards anyway, before and after) and the installation. Low dollar stuff considering all the publicity it produced.
Your Housebites folks spent even less than that. I tip my hat to them.
If it’s a real service, it’s a real service, just like restaurants who offer burgers big enough to kill someone are offering a real product. If osmeone buys it and drops dead, the restaurant can’t say, “Hey, we never thought anyone would really eat the thing.” The dirty pans service encourages lying, and makes an implicit statement that there’s nothing the matter with lying to your guests. It does this whether anyone buys it or not, and whether the motive was PR or not. The rest is just consequentialism. I don’t understand congratulating a company for encouraging and endorsing lying, PR or not. I suppose a child-sitting service that offered to torture your kids out of bad habits for an extra fee could earn similar kudos. All tongue in cheek, you know…for PR.
Jack, your child torture example breaks from all the other examples used in that it’s a criminal abuse service – essentially assault-for-hire. The others, while lying/deceptive, create false impressions about their patrons, but they don’t actually break any laws.
A better analogy (and to me, an obviously unethical site) is Ashley Madison – you know, the website that is a dating service for extramarital affairs. While adultery is no longer illegal (as far as I know), it is still unethical, and I find that service reprehensible.
I didn’t (and don’t) see the illegal/unethical distinction as critical, as the question involved whether an inappropriate service was acceptable if it was just offered to get attention. That said, I nearly mentioned Ashley Madison in the original post. I didn’t, because every time I have I’ve gotten all sorts of visits from eager adulterers.
I was wondering too, why you hadn’t mentioned that other site. But not because I was already thinking about it, or would ever be tempted by it. It’s pollution enough, I suppose, just to know it exists.