6pm.com's 1.6 million dollar pricing mistake
blogs.zappos.com
blogs.zappos.com
Considering they could have had to pay $1.6m + class action legal fees means they saved a lot of money by simply taking the loss.
What they probably can't do is ship you your stuff for $50, find the mistake a month later, and then silently charge your credit card the $500 difference. And they probably can't ask you to send the stuff back.
If they take your money and don't have the item, they have to refund you or provide a like product at the same or discounted price, cannot be more than 10% more than the listed price or it violates another subsection of the law for price estimates. Or they're back into the above and $250,000 in punitive damages.
If they don't take your money, they're open for a suit for advertising the product and not providing it at the listed price. At this point it is merely on the judges discretion, and doesn't fall under the CPA. However, considering every product was capped at $50 and no one noticed, they would really be up shit creek without a paddle. It's a gross mistake and they made no attempt to reconcile the error (you know by shutting down the site) until 6am because they made no effort to check their pricing accuracy.
Like I said, they'd be open to a $1.6m lawsuit + the cost of legal fees and considering they obviously made no effort to check their prices, I don't see how they would have a defence. This isn't one little item that slipped through the net, it's the whole fucking store including the vinyl floor tiles!
There's no guarantee they would have to pay, it would be entirely up to a judge, but considering they obviously have no practices or policies in place to ensure these things are caught means they'd have no defence in court saying 'it was a mistake' because it wasn't, it was a complete lack of a price accuracy policy.
You're absolutely wrong.
There is a strong protection here in Ontario against liability for technical errors, and it has come into effect multiple times (always with entitled people thinking they won the lottery writing angry letters to the editor decrying their grievous injury). So long as they reverse any charges, neither party is out anything and no one has any entitlement to the result of a mistake.
Did you read the article? They shut down the site when they saw the problem, which occurred between midnight and 6am, a popular time for sleeping.
If I remember my law class in the UK, there is no legal reason to ship the goods in this situation. The price online is only one that is offered. The buyer giving money to the retailer is considered an acceptance of the offer, but the contract is not binding unless the retailer then displays that they still wish to go ahead with the transaction on those terms. My lecturer always referred to it as the courts wanting to see "a meeting of minds."
This leaves online retailers (and brick and mortar that sticker an item wrong) the time to change anything before the item is placed in the buyer's hands, and the court will look particularly down on a transaction where the buyer could not have reasonably expected the transaction to be valid (like buying a TV for 1 GBP).
My understanding was that much of contract law in the US was based on UK law, but I am by no means a lawyer in either jurisdiction :)
It's request for offers of purchase from customers. When buyer puts item in the online basket and fills in his details he is making an offer to the seller that he wants to purchase the goods at the given price. If the seller sends the buyer confirmation email stating that he actually wants to deliver the good (automatic notifications about registering buyers offer do not count) then the contract with all the following obligations is formed.
(certainly prior to taking the money then they are able to simply cancel the order at any time. After that I suppose it depends on the country/contract law involved)
An agreement between stores, and I believe one Amazon.ca upholds, is that they offer you the product at the original price with a $10 discount/credit (if it costs more than $10 - free if it costs less than $10). However, this is just a practice to placate the consumer as on gross mispricings like a $1000 TV for $5 people know they're taking advantage and will either be happy to take the $10 off, or will cancel the agreement thus removing all legal liability on the company. However, if the $5 had entered the till and a manager came running out trying to stop you leave with the TV, well you just got a $5 TV and if they stop you, they get up to a $250,000 fine and you get yourself a TV. Quite ironically though, if you notify the cashier of the mispricing, most store policies will give you the item for free regardless of price! So the people walking away with the $10 credit are really losing much more than if they had honestly notified a manager.
One of the caveats is that the agreement is generally to sell X number of products at $Y price, and if they don't have the quantity of products to supply the amount of orders they can actually cancel the orders and later reoffer them at a corrected price, which is probably what Argos got away with.
Ultimately it will depend on where the company is based; but for the most part mispriced items are usually explicitly accounted for in the Terms and Conditions of sale you agree to (I know that was part of what Argos used over here).
I seem to recall there was a legal argument over it.. because in the real world if a shop advertises a $10 for $1 there is no legal requirement (at least not here) for them to sell it at that price - if they notice. If they accept your offer to buy at the lower price then there is nothing they can do.
The argument was that digital sales worked in a different way (and that manually approving each sale like in a shop was infeasible) so I am pretty sure a lot of work went into making sure the law applied to when the item was shipped. I noticed Amazon still don't take money till they ship the item; so it could be this was never actually resolved.
(by the way I can't find any references to the laws you mention - got any links?)
No. They are based near Las Vegas.
You walk into a store and walk up to the till and ask to buy something, then at that moment the person behind the till tells you the price is wrong and it's actually 3 times that. Buy saying you wanted to buy it you are then contractually obliged under consumer law to then pay for the goods.
Doesn't sound right now does it.
Argos didn't get away with anything, they are no requirement under the sale of goods act to honor the price and can cancel the order (effectively they are refusing your business which is how it actually works but is obviously not worded as such for politeness) if they choose to.
"TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS
In the event a product is listed at an incorrect price or with incorrect information due to typographical error or error in pricing or product information received from our suppliers, we shall have the right to refuse or cancel any orders placed for product listed at the incorrect price. We shall have the right to refuse or cancel any such orders whether or not the order has been confirmed and your credit card charged. If your credit card has already been charged for the purchase and your order is canceled, we shall immediately issue a credit to your credit card account in the amount of the charge."
http://www.6pm.com/terms-of-use
If you are going to talk like a lawyer you should act like a lawyer and read the fine print.
What T&C can't do is rescind the basic consumer rights offered under law
IANAL so that's just how I read it.
Until today I had not ever heard about 6pm.com.
Due solely to their mistake, this post, and their honor, I'll be sure and check them out for future purchases.
Maybe you've lapped Good Taste, and are catching up to it again.
I've got a "Shrodinger's cat is dead" (with "not dead" on the back) shirt which helps me find interesting people (THE most random people understand it). I'd argue that's more useful than fashion (does it have a use?), and remember that stick-figure shirts occasionally explode in popularity (I remember a big burst several years ago). XKCD is just a superior-taste subset of those.
edit: heck, "fashion" hasn't served me too well anyway. I wore a blue-screen-of-death shirt to one of my interviews, and got the job. The interviewer called the boss in to laugh at the shirt :)
Because part of the point of "taste" is to exclude others, or, if you prefer, to distinguish oneself (which is the same as excluding others). Money helps reduce the uncommitted.
Also it's not fair to judge it by major media exposure because:
1. The people who got those deals will generate word of mouth
2. If they hadn't honored it it would have generated negative word of mouth
Gotta factor those two in.
Peter: "Oh! Well, this is not a mundane detail, Michael!"
Michael: "Hey, quit getting pissed at me. Alright? This was all your idea, ---hole!"
Peter: "Alright, okay, alright, let's try not to get pissed off at each other. Alright? Let's just calm down, let's try to figure this thing out together."
Anyway, downvoters, the quotes were an actual answer. It was probably some very minor detail that escaped notice until downstream effects (low price cap) made it evident. Without more information it's a waste of time to try guessing what that minor detail may have been.
It's hard to imagine how that would end up repricing items though. Without a total blanking out moment in the programmer's head, anyway, which I'm sure we've all been guilty of.
Same with rm -Rf /foo/bar. There's a moment when pressing enter will do the wrong thing. I usually use relative paths to avoid this, but I have had to repair the damage for someone who actually managed to rm -Rf / by accident due to this.
Also for Update/Delete query I run the equivalent select (rows or count(*) ) query first, just to make sure.
also make sure to write where predicate before completing the whole sql. (The sql does not go through by accidentally hitting enter, before the whole statement is written)
tl;dr - Run read operation before doing write/update/delete operations.
def build_query()
"UPDATE prices SET price=4995 #{where_clause}"
end
def where_clause() # only set prices on products in our group of stuff to sell
return "oops, I'm accidentally an empty string"
end
The difference: what Zappos noticed in the course of six hours, Nalgene didn't notice from about Saturday afternoon 'till Monday morning.
In 10 years of shopping, it's never happened.
Also, what with the downvotes...