And do it with less snark. Just state it seems clear you won't ever see eye to eye, and give the money back.

Legally, the remedy for breach of contract is to make the injured party whole, and that includes consequential damages. The customer may suffer consequential damages in excess of the price paid for the product (eg. "After buying your product I bought a new garage door to suit your product and now I have to get a different one to use with your competitor's product since the next best thing requires a different specification").

Offering a full refund is still entirely appropriate of course; I'm just pointing out that the customer doesn't have to accept that as a final settlement.

I don't see a customer getting a free garage door out of it. Using the refund to buy a competitive product would arguably make them whole. Minus perhaps wasted time. Assuming you parted ways because of their behavior (not a review), they arguably wasted their own time.

Nor do I. That would imply that the customer had some extra asset at the end. That is beyond making the customer whole, because such a thing presumably has a market value and can be sold, even if just for scrap.

> Using the refund to buy a competitive product would arguably make them whole.

Not necessarily. If the customer has additional costs that have not been reimbursed, and these costs were incurred as a consequence of the seller's breach of contract despite the customer's reasonable efforts to minimize them, then by definition the customer hasn't been made whole. Search for the meaning of "consequential damages".

It's up to the court to decide how to address the balance. It may decide that it isn't reasonable to reimburse some extra costs anyway. And in the US, legal fees won't be reimbursed so the customer may decide to settle for less. But if it does go to court, then in the case that the seller has "fired" the customer unreasonably the court may look upon the customer's claims for consequential damages more favorably.

I can't get a new car if I buy an alternator and it's faulty. Maybe if it damaged the car, but there's no corollary here.

Edit: This happens all the time. Amazon "fires" sellers. Hosting companies "fire" people that suffered a DDOS, or similar cases to this one...customers that are snarky with tech support. Paypal "fires" customers at will, often with no details as to why. I've read many of these stories and never heard of a case where someone got something more than actual, direct losses back (like existing account balance).

Some sellers may attempt to adjust the contracts to make this true. Depending on your jurisdiction and the nature of the sale, this may or may not actually change the contract. AFAIK, we have yet to see a clause of "I'll sell you this IoT device for a one-off payment of $X and I can arbitrarily decide to stop it working as long as I pay you $X and nothing more" succeed in court.

Not court cases, but IoT customers do get abandoned.

Google's Nest bought Revolv and shut it down. As far as I know, they offered nothing at all as compensation. These were $300 devices. No related successful court cases from end users, as far as I know...and that's worse than what I suggested...no refund.

Fair enough?

This "firing customers" terminology shows how deep in the Late Capitalism nightmare we really are.

That said, there seems to be this attitude among some tech companies that they can do whatever they want, and treat customers/users like crap, regardless of regulations, or just what is usual and customary. I think it's a side-effect of people who have no prior business background getting a ton of investor money (i.e. not earning it from business with customers).

But in this case we are talking about bricking hardware remotely in retribution for a negative review. And we have people using the "Firing customers" rhetoric to insinuate that the needs of the corporation are more important than the needs of the human.

[I think we're basically in agreement, just expanding on my point]

Euh that's exactly what's happening here. If the company bricks the product you bought it's a net loss. So you're definitely not getting what you paid for. The analogy would work only if you decided to do before anything was bought (impossible of course) or refund them 100%.

Is that really desirable, once you think about it that way?

And do you really think this is some sort of "Late Capitalism nightmare"? You really think nobody had ever decided not to do business with a specific customer before?

This isn't a "late capitalism" issue; this is a "social media greatly amplifies previously quiet signals, and does so with a certain amount of randomness". But the reality probably hasn't changed... just your ability to detect it.

Are you actually defending the practice of a company damaging or destroying private property, remotely, in retribution for a bad review?

Try re-reading in that context and thinking about it again.

If you seriously put your pride on a pedestal next to all of that, you just shouldn't be dealing with B2C in the first place; you will be a menace to your organization.

However, to me, there is a line. "The customer is always right" can't be literal.

I have no issue parting ways, with a full refund, for toxic customers that repeatedly use abusive language with my employees. Especially when it's not relative to the situation. These kind of customers do exist. It's not common, but do e-commerce long enough and you'll run into one.

There are also (not often) customers that engage in return fraud or other activity that is just obvious cause to avoid them in the future.

people put the slightest emotions they get on a pedestal as a valid reason to do and justify anything.

If you approach everyone who so much as barks like they're a mad dog, you'll end up meeting a shocking number "mad dogs".

You're likely to get better service from me if you're polite. I don't feel badly about that.

I respect your position, I do, and I wish it were the standard, but realistically it puts you at a potential disadvantage.

"Fuck this product."

That appears to be before any contact with anyone at all.

That, alone, doesn't cross a line. But it is a clue that the interaction might quickly lead down a path where you choose to part ways.

I'd have been initially polite, helpful, try to fix the issue, etc. But there would be some line where I'd stop.

There's very little a customer can do to meaningfully impact either of them. Hell, the companies can be (and regularly are) shitty to someone personally, and they still will use their services.

EDIT: more counterexamples - Comodo. Lenovo. Uber. AirBnB. They were all involved in huge Internet shitstorms about anti-customer behaviours, and they don't look like they've lost anything through it. I've seen enough shitstorms - small and big, local and global - to learn that they generally don't mean a thing, and most people forget about them in a week.

Grocery Stores? I don't see how that applies... they tend to be highly customer-focused, and they certainly don't do the equivalent of bricking a product after selling it to you because they didn't like your tone.

Still I take your point... if you're a Unicorn then you play by different rules, until/unless it all catches up with you (as it is with Uber). If however, you're not a telecom monopoly, a giant bank, or just crazy like Uber (if for example you're trying to sell IoT fricking door openers) then you are in a very very different position don't you think?!

- bribe the customers leaving negative reviews into cancelling them, by offering e.g. free products

- use multiple accounts on the marketplace services, kill off an account after it got too many negative reviews and create a new one to continue

The point being, "customer is always right" is not something that works for all B2C; depending on your market type, there may be strategies that let you be pretty much immune from the effects of a wronged customer seeking revenge. For instance, commodity items are bought by people who are mostly price-sensitive; as long as you keep a lower price, even angry reviews won't mean much. This works well for brick-and-mortar grocery stores (and other inherently local stores) and for business that sell through on-line marketplaces like eBay. It's sometimes even beneficial to not have a strong social media presence - Facebook pages and Twitter accounts are a good place for angry customers to vent off and spread the bad word about you.

Basically, this is a business in which you need to desperately convince the customer to want an ongoing relationship with you, for a service they could get with a $5 remote, 9volt included.

The company here behaved wrong and they deserve whatever loss of business comes out of this mess, regardless of how rude the customer was. They handled it badly. That said, I have no particular love for IoT companies - I find the idea of those cloud-connected devices to be dumb from both user and engineering point of view. To be clear - I'm not opposed to smart devices per se - just those which require vendor's cloud, which makes them basically hardware-as-a-service, and which works against privacy and interoperability.

It would have achieved the exact same result, and I am sure the backlash wouldn't be 10% as severe.

In this case, I would have tried to help online (in the forum) at least once, despite the rude forum post. If it kept up, I'd have emailed the "we need to part ways, here's a refund" note.

- Musk had not already sold the individual a car.

- Musk was (possibly) responding not to the critical blog post, but to the content of the phone conversation.

- It has not been decided yet, but I doubt Garadget will ultimately have the popularity and cachet of Tesla's cars. This, for better or worse, does have an impact on what you can get away with.

- All of the above notwithstanding, maybe this was not Elon Musk's finest moment. Not ever word out of his mouth is useful for all purposes. Citing the fact he said something, even if he was in a situation that is perfectly analogous to one's own, does not justify one's comparable action.

That being said, I do agree with all your points. I tend to think no garage door company is going to have the cachet of any Elon Musk company. Frankly, only Elon Musk could send out that tweet and not get hammered.

That relationship is severely imbalanced in B2C transactions, and abusing that it is why consumer protection laws exist. Given the widespread acknowledgment of the abusable nature of that relationship, the only reasonable expectation to abusing it that doesn't rise to the level of crime or tort is still loud public disapproval.

Why not?

> to speak of firing customers is an abusive cognitive power play.

The guy responsible for the term "fired" was well known for abusive power plays - http://meta.ath0.com/2015/03/17/etymology-of-youre-fired/

> Patterson had a way to deal with executives who particularly displeased him. in a previous case, he had the businessman’s desk and chair dragged out onto the lawn, where they were set on fire. Apparently Watson’s desk was similarly dragged out and burned, and the man himself was dismissed. When other employees asked where Watson was, Patterson simply said “Fired.”

The expectation is that a company is much more aware of the risk tied to a contract it enters (f.e. by having it examined by a legal department, requiring the supplier it wants to buy services or goods from to first sign their own contract that lays out some ground rules etc), and is generally much more professional in handling such situations.

You would wish that normal consumers also read their contracts carefully and understand them, but in reality they do not. So there is a long list of laws in place to protect them and "level the playing field" between unsuspecting consumers and corporations.

I strongly disagree with the assertion all customers can be dealt with "civilly" while still remaining sane. Customer irrationality is widely varied, and sometimes you just need to take matters into Fate's hands to get back to rationality. OTOH, it's not something you want to do regularly, with the customers that is.

What you see as "customer irrationality" is, in 99.9% of cases, actually a user experience problem that could have been addressed with better design and better testing before the customer ever bought the product.

For that remaining 0.1%, the appropriate course of action is not to deal with people poorly and treat your customers badly, but to offload your customer services to someone else who is more patient and more capable.

It is simply impossible to know what me, or the fictitious irrational customer, is thinking, regardless of made up statistics that are meaningless to anything when it (the irrational event) actually happens. Thinking that it can be "solved in the future" by moving some things around in this reality is irrational as well, especially given you assume that process may be improved to the point it doesn't happen "much" or there are people with infinitely more patience than the previous person to deal with it, or that people won't become more irrational when you force them into rational action. All irrational, which is simply meant to say, it will require more work to determine.

That I'm being downvoted is one piece of evidence there are people who don't like what I'm saying because they think it also can be "solved". Also irrational. So, I state it again now for good measure:

"One may not remain rational while being forced to deal with a given amount of irrationality."

Some customers are really problem people, and a private company is not a charity in business of teaching people how to live in a civilized society. So it's a reasonable business decision to try and get rid of some of the customers (or risk your support people burning out); the issue is not whether to do it, but how to do it without risking additional damage to your business.

Most importantly, it's not something you deal with publicly.

Nope, it does.

His original post (not posts) pointed at foul language first and foremost, which was then compounded by posting an equally charming Amazon review without making any attempt to wait for a reply. So his follow-up matches the post that led to this whole brouhaha.

But let's not allow this ruin all the fun of the vigilante justice and trying to beat the living daylights out this guy.