Give a man a fish, and he'll sue you for a lifetime supply.

Teach a man to fish, and his friends will sue you for not teaching them.

Ah, the new American dream! I've read where a number of people have talked about how people they'd given something to got a sense of entitlement, expected more freebies, and even got mad when they finally got kicked off of the gravy train.

Here's my little experience in that arena. A few weeks ago, I had a customer buy a number of my products. After they'd bought the first one, they got "one time offers" for discounts on others, which they took. Then they emailed me, asking in a somewhat demanding, entitled tone for a discount on one of my other products.

My first instinct was to say "eat rocks, just because I gave you a few good deals, that doesn't mean I have to cut my prices for every product." Now I like to be nice to people, and I like making sales, but this guy hadn't bought anything that "entitled" him to a discount on that product (and when I say "entitled", I mean "for which I had previously decided to offer" -- not that anyone is literally "entitled" to discounts because they bought something else). So I was about to tell him "sorry, but I don't offer a discount on that product".

But then I checked and saw that I do. He just needed to go a slightly different route to get there. I'll try to make this comprehensible: He'd bought product A at full price, and gotten a "one time offer" for product B at a discount. If instead he'd bought product C at full price, he would have gotten product B as a free bonus, and would have been offered a discount on product D -- the one he was asking for a discount on.

So I emailed him back suggesting that if he bought product C, I'd refund his initial purchase of product B. He did. I made more money. He got the products he wanted and the discount. All was good in the world.

Still it's funny -- if I'd never offered a discount for any of my products, he probably wouldn't have thought twice about paying full price for product D.