Dell fined $6.5M after admitting it made overpriced monitors look discounted
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
In before “how do we believe you?” I wrote this all up in a blog post, under my real name, with backing details. If I’m lying, Dell can sue me for defamation.
A Dell corporate sales person contacted me at work to talk about setting up a work account. It felt sooo good to send them a link to my blog post and explain that Dell was dead to me. I didn’t hear back.
A company trying to weasel out of its warranty obligations is hardly something I'd cast doubt on anymore (unfortunately).
But too many people tried to make a living out of scamming Nordstrom's patient indulgence of this, and they changed their policy.
Warranty fraud is a major problem.
The dumb version of the story was good PR at first and was disseminated among the staff but contributed to unreasonable customer expectations.
The monitor is within the warranty period and failed. Dell didn't deal with their warranty issue in an honest and direct way. They suck. No other details matter. The end.
The real moral of this story is to never buy electronics from Amazon. Amazon sold you a fraudulent product and you’re blaming Dell for Amazon’s failures.
Much easier to tell people to f.off when they're not standing in front of you in your shop holding the crap goods. Amazon and Dell both push that with suppliers & customers.
Amazon is well known for this exact kind of issue due to intentionally commingling products they frequently can’t separate returns from new products. It’s so bad everyone I know well that shops at Amazon has run into obviously used Amazon items sold as new, but not for any single brand.
Dell messing up their completely automated warranty database on the other hand requires an extraordinary series of events.
There’s no way Dell is more likely to be the culprit.
If Amazon are crapping on dell's brand that is 100% Dell's problem to solve. As soon as they see the receipt they should honor the warranty fully and then go hard on Amazon because they look bad. But they do not care at all about their customers seems to be a common conclusion based on experience. Whether amazon suck does not make dell's conduct any more acceptable.
Dell are known for their total contempt of their customers.
Not honoring the warranty is they only defense here as it forces Amazon to fix the issue or risk being charged with fraud.
That's a new one you're not a customer because middleman so can be no issue with warranty ever. Dell's PR would love it if they cared, which they clearly don't because why bother.
Not an option.
As to PR, you should buy a 500$ used car and then take it to the manufacturer I am sure they would be happy to make warranty repairs because that’s just great PR for them…
If Amazon committed fraud here, Dell are the victims and can deal with it. But Dell have a reputation and it is deserved. Ring them up sometime to discuss it with them, go on, try talking to them about anything.
Why are you sticking up for a bazillion dollar company behaving badly?
You'd have no way of knowing. People used to (maybe still do?) buy expensive graphic cards, take them out and put back a cheap one with a flashed ROM. Then shrink-wrap the box again and return it.
You wouldn't blame the manufacturer in that case. I never buy expensive things from Amazon because you can never trust what you're going to get, especially with inventory comingling.
If you bought directly from the Dell website, I'd share more of your anger. I also dislike Dell in general though, so I wouldn't buy their stuff anyway.
While this may be true, it’s Dell’s lost opportunity to honor their product warranty in a generous way. Obviously it’s turned this customer into a permanent antagonist.
What’s more, the product Dell has in their warehouse should cost Dell less than the advertising, or marketing costs to get new customers.
edit, here is the gist:
In July 2020, the Court found that Kogan had misled consumers by advertising over a period of four days that they could use the code ‘TAXTIME’ to reduce prices by 10 per cent at checkout, when Kogan had increased the prices of 621 products immediately before the promotion.
In most cases, the prices of these products had been increased by at least 10 per cent. Kogan then decreased those prices soon after the promotion ended, many back to their pre-promotion prices.
https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/kogan-to-pay-350000-fo....
This is to prevent this exact practice where a store either lies and slaps a discount sticker on it without any discount to mislead a consumer, or from them putting up the price for 24 hours and then discounting it.
There is no exact length of time, the law says "reasonable". So it'd be up to a court to decide.
You can learn more here https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/pricing/price-displays
Sounds like my 9 year old "It was an accident!!"
So definitely a costly affair.
We have some very strong consumer laws especially around deceptive pricing and expectations of the life of appliances
Probably the worst purchase I made. The one saving grace is that SupportAssist actually works, and does make post-crash/post-windows-death recovery very simple and easy.
But that's the thing. I can tell that they put effort into this OS recovery tool, explicitly because this Laptop is a disaster of a product. Temperatures? Burning. Fans? Locked down. Freezing? Constantly. Crashing? Commonly. Blue screens? Less common now, but used to be frequent.
Just had to do another OS recovery yesterday. But hey, it breaks constantly like a Russian Lada, and can be "fixed" relatively quickly and easily.
Reality is that the product is just cheaper and worse than the competitor.
This computer was purchased based on one of these "sales". In terms of raw performance, it seemed like a decent deal. It was not. The issue isn't just their monitors, so I am a bit confused as to why this fine singles out monitors.
Waves is... incredibly annoying. Could be worse I suppose, but I wish it wasn't a thing. The computer will randomly shut off the audio jack so it makes audio issues even harder to diagnose. The number of times where I was monkeying around trying to figure out what was causing it. Ugh.
I find that it usually involves 3 steps. The audio\mic quality downgrades, then entirely shuts off the mic, then shuts off audio.
I have a Inspirion(?) G7 7790. It's an old machine by today's standards, but it has had many problems from the start.
The "good" thing was that when this happened I bought a cheap post lease Thinkpad and just put my XPS's nvme in. I could resume work straight away it just worked.
I paid £100 for that Thinkpad and it was miles better than then flagship XPS.
That being said, I decided to take a plunge and bought M1 Max. This think is next level and smokes any laptops I had before.
But Dell in comparison is just complete junk and that company should be banned from making laptops.
So vendors won't ship them shit, because they know they'll eat the returns.
I'm sure they do additional curation on top of that, but making them stand behind the product probably gets 80% of the way there.
So if random brand X wants to keep selling those toilets at Costco, they will sometimes get a deduction from their invoice because a curmudgeon brought in a ten year old toilet that broke.
(Costco had to change this policy on computers and TVs because word got out and people began abusing the policy so much the vendors revolted.)
Costco op.
Eventually, I’ll just say F it and get rid of Prime. Two day shipping is gone for a lot of items anyways. 5 days of wait is better than constance vigilance to prevent getting garbage from 3rd party sellers
Compare today: we have major retailers demanding exclusive SKUs to prevent apples-to-apples comparisons, and it doesn't matter anyway because most people are Amazon Prime members and don't really bother shopping around.
Out of warranty (just) no way to ask Dell anything about it.
Dell are horrible. I hate them. The price has to be insanely cheap for Dell not to be just a plain old ripoff at the best of times. Actual lies, like detailed here should not surprise anyone.