I was just reading an article about stores charging "restocking fees" for returned items. This practice, which is becoming more and more common on items such as consumer electronics, deducts part of the purchase price, often up to 15% if the item's box has been opened before being returned. For high-ticket items such as computers, this can be a significant sum.

A spokesman for the Retailers Association of Massachusetts defended the practice. It's actually "proconsumer", he explained. Merchants cannot resell the items at full value, so if stores did not charge these fees, they would have to recover the costs by charging higher prices to everybody.

This is the same argument that we hear whenever there's a high-visibility issue that has potential impact on the profit margin of businesses. Impose taxes on businesses and they're just going to have to pass them on to consumers in the form of higher prices. Benefits for workers? It'll just mean higher prices for consumers. You want regulations to protect the environment? Be prepared for price tags to go up.

Now, I'm not one of those who thinks that "Big Business" is the enemy and we can bleed and regulate companies incessantly without ill effect. As a worker I've suffered enough from layoffs and business closings to know that business do have to retrench and sometimes fail.

But I get weary of the business-centric view. I don't think it's any less fair to respond to absurd restocking fees by saying that they are anti-business, because by having these fees in place retailers may drive away marginal purchasers, reducing demand.

Reduce workers' benefits? That's anti-business, because workers will just demand higher wages to compensate.

For every "this will drive up costs for consumers" platitude, there's an equal and opposite "drive up consumer cost and it will cut your volume of sales".

The law of supply and demand cuts both ways. To imply anything else is just manipulative rhetoric.