Commercial businesses like to call their clients "God" and label all their sales tricks with the slogan "You are sure of our sincere service". Beware! Never regard yourself as a "God". For, in the minds of many business owners, nothing but the money in your wallet is their true "God".

Last Friday, a restaurant in Hebei Province staged an event to celebrate its one-year anniversary. It fired banknotes worth 2,000-yuan ($263) into the air using an electronic cannon to lure public attention. Passersby competed with each other to grab the money in a glaring demonstration of greed. Fortunately there were no stampede.

A week earlier, a Carrefour outlet in Chongqing sold edible oil at a big discount in a sales promotion drive. Three customers died and 31 were injured in a stampede triggered by the sales.

In these two incidents, the businesses pursued profits by allegedly disregarding human dignity. Cheap sales causing stampedes and fatalities have occurred in the past in other places and local governments (including Chongqing) had issued notices banning such sales.

The Chongqing Carrefour, however, apparently carried out its sales in disregard of the possible tragic consequences, though it arranged for security guards to "keep order".

In the Hebei incident, the restaurant took precautionary measures in advance. But it used a trivial amount of money to lure people into a show of greed and loss of human dignity.

Listen to what a manager of the restaurant said: "Firing money into the air symbolized 'Heaven' showering luck" and was meant to create "an atmosphere of flourishing patronage".

This fully reveals the mentality of the restaurant's owners - they were the "Heaven" doling out alms to the public, who were merely stage props in a farce staged to gain business blessings.

In similar cases where people scramble for cheap handouts or loot goods from overturned vehicles (as in highway accidents), critics often accuse these people of coveting small gains and associate their behavior with the "low quality of civilization" among the Chinese populace.

These people are mostly common folk, who treasure every penny, given their poor livelihood. In fact, greed is a subconscious element in human nature. Are not business people greedy?

Their greed, once released unbridled, would go even farther than what the populace would demonstrate. The only difference is that common people's greed manifests itself at a superficial level while business people and corrupt officials hide their avarice deeper in their hearts and appease it in a wiser manner.

An ancient Chinese saying states: "All men love wealth but a civilized man obtains it through legal means and within moral limits." Common people involved in the two cases certainly need to improve their overall standards with regard to civilization. The business owners in the cases are more in need of moral revamping.

Making use of common people's involuntary appetite for small gains to boost business opportunities and potential profits, and enjoying seeing customers, mostly senior citizens, scrambling for a limited amount of money is even more disgusting, for it represents a rape of human dignity.

Email: liushinan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 11/21/2007 page10)