Pretty ridiculous especially when all of the advertising of those computers is designed to be utterly confusing and impossible to compare for the customer. One could easily picture a 70% off sale on a computer with a different sku and a made up "regular price" advertised as a deal, it's basically how the industry operates. So it's funny to see HP claim she should have known better.
Some countries (e.g. UK) have laws about this: you can't just make up a high price then advertise a big discount from that price. The higher price has to be "real" (usually defined as they were selling actual units of the thing to customers for that price for so many weeks, within so many weeks of the sale date).
The US definitely has rules on what constitutes a sale price. Though how often the FTC goes after retailers, I don't know. Probably only when someone complains.
I remember reading that France has hundreds of price inspectors who secretly visit stores all year taking down the prices.
When the annual discount season comes around, they compare the discount prices to the data compiled through the year to ensure the advertised discount percentages are real and representative of the long-term pricing trend (instead of, say, yanking up the price briefly before the discounts start).
Seems like we almost have this capability for online retailers thanks to sites like camelcamelcamel. Just needs the appropriate plug ins.
The canonical way to thwart this in meat space is to have channel-specific SKUs (e.g. same product sold at Best Buy and Costco but with different model numbers).
Channel specific SKUs is common already, but would it be legal to use the same trick for same-channel seasonal sales? I'm not aware of it being done, but maybe it is and I just haven't noticed.
For example, sell product all year round as item sku-0001 for $100, while also listing an identical product as item sku-0001b which costs $150 but is not promoted at all. Then the day before black friday, stop selling item sku-0001, and promote item sku-0001b for $105 with a flashing "30% off!!" sign?
If you're a third party trying this on Amazon then it has downsides such as lack of reviews, poor ranking etc. on sku-0001b that most of the year nobody is buying. But if you're a retailer with your own online shop, then you just say that the reviews are for this family of products and display the sku-0001 reviews on the sku-0001b page while promoting sku-0001b heavily during the black friday campaign...
And then the day after the sale ends, item sku-0001 magically reappears for its usual price of $100 ($5 cheaper than sku-0001b's sale price, but no flashing banner to promote the fact) and sku-0001b spends the next months to a year not being bought or promoted again.
> If you're a third party trying this on Amazon then it has downsides such as lack of reviews, poor ranking etc. on sku-0001b that most of the year nobody is buying
I doubt Amazon themselves would care. They permit a different scam in which you sell sku-0001a (say, a USB cable), garner lots of positive reviews, and then reassign the sku to a completely different device ($250 drone) and get lots of sales. FTC doesn’t appear to have paid any attention to Amazon’s scam enablement.
Going specifically to the topic of this post: I could imagine using this to reassign the sku from one laptop to another which would be much harder to enforce.
Some jurisdictions have laws about needing to have actual sales (within some time window) at the reference price, not merely being available at that price.
> Royal Mail told me, apologetically, that HP requested the return of the laptop while it was out for delivery, a request so rare no relevant tracking update existed. So the driver scanned the “refused delivery” option.
I'm genuinely curious -- how does this even work? This isn't something I've ever heard of anybody being able to do, for the sender to cancel delivery mid-way.
Is this someone anyone can do? Only large corporate customers? Or something in a custom contract? How does the delivery service even handle it -- do they manually call the driver on the phone and be like, "hey never mind about that one package"?
Anyone can do it for personal shipments on UPS.com I realized last week when I needed to re-route the package. The seller can do it and so can the buyer. But I also noticed the seller can just cancel the delivery.
Immediately realized it could be used for fraud by pretending to prove the shipment.
I routinely rerouted my packages in San Diego since UPS wouldn't attempt delivery. You can do it with most packages unless the seller specifically has specifically forbidden it, (thank you Ingram Micro for sending me on a 3 day chase for my package)
They probably only allow it for business customers. In which case there's a shipper account associated with the tracking number and they have online access to view/manage all outgoing parcels/deliveries.
This used to be called Quantum View; a quick google suggests it still is.
You create an account if you are sending online. The shipment is linked to that account. Then when you ship in-person you can add those shipments to your online account via some id on the shipping receipt last time I checked.
Amazon India can't do this - or that is what they have told me. This has happened with me multiple times. I ordered an item that I didn't want anymore and they clearly said they can't do anything about it and I should just refuse accepting it or raise a return and refund later which they assured on email they would do.
Strangely, they said they can re-route the package to another address if I tha is what I wanted. So I said why not reroute to themselves or the seller? Well, that also was not possible. Weird.
As for delivery people scanning something like refused delivery or so (incorrectly) - it's very regular with Amazon in India (pretty sure with others as well; but I have pretty only been ordering from Amazon of late). Amazon gives you a pretty wide delivery time range - something like 7am to 9pm - yup that wide and there is no way for you know of a shorter time window. Now the delivery folks are extremely overloaded and overworked. So you wait and wait and wait and suddenly at 10pm, sometimes even at 11pm you receive a SMS saying something on the lines of "not present at address", "attempted delivery failure" and you know that was not the case. After a while you give up even raising this issue with Amazon.
> Amazon India can't do this - or that is what they have told me. This has happened with me multiple times. I ordered an item that I didn't want anymore and they clearly said they can't do anything about it and I should just refuse accepting it or raise a return and refund later which they assured on email they would do.
Can't and won't are easily confused. Probably Amazon (India) won't recall the package, and the customer service rep can't request it per policy. Likely their delivery contract includes return shipping for refused packages at a lower rate than recalled packages. But if it's a pricing error of thousands of pounds, it may make sense to pay for a recall; I've also seen recalls for gross packaging errors, if the shipping department sends a carton of items instead of unboxing the carton and sending the individual items as expected. It's much easier to ask the carrier to recall the package than to work with the customer, although proper notice to the customer should be included... For one thing, carrier recalls don't always work.
If you notice the entire sentence, after the hyphen as well, it clearly mentions what it was. I will spell out - they said they "couldn't" and I added that is what they told me. As in they stated on a recorded call and then also sent an email stating just that that "they can't".
Besides
> customer service rep can't request it per policy …. .. contract includes .. ..
Is it meaningfully different from "can't" or "won't" or "don't usually"? I don't think so.
And when it's a case of an exception then of course all it needs, among other methods, is one call from some supply chain manager at the seller to the supply chain manager at the courier/shipper and it gets done, irrespective of what their CRM/CMS/or IT infra supports or not.
> sometimes even at 11pm you receive a SMS saying something on the lines of "not present at address", "attempted delivery failure" and you know that was not the case
LaserShip in the US is notorious for this. Amazon uses it for a lot of same-day/1-day stuff, and I'd say at least 80% of the time I get a fake "not present at address" around 9:30 pm that evening, and it actually gets delivered the next afternoon.
I have to assume LaserShip has some contract that they have to deliver x% of packages on time, and this is how they manage to avoid that entirely. And I'm sure Amazon is 100% aware, but they don't care because if somebody calls customer service to complain, they just blame it on LaserShip.
I had a similar "delivery failure" experience in bangalore anomaly a decade ago and that too from courier company FedEx which kinda guarantees delivery times. When I talked to the guy the next day, he apologized and said there were too many packages and that's the only way they see to push things to next day without getting docked for it. Shitty but that seemed to be the common practice - not that I ran into it again just going by how it was explained to me.
And then I have had it happen a couple of times here in US I think mostly during early Covid days probably when the prime delivery was new and still building its edge conditions around deliveries (taking pictures, emails split second after delivery).
They can recall if the seller requests a recall for any reason. Not the customer. Typical use cases include wrong product sent, wrong packaging, missed an item etc. It's a rare scenario but it has happened to people I know.
From a customer's perspective, they cannot recall. Likely, if you order via Amazon with Amazon delivery, the contract they have with the seller for Amazon delivery mandates them to deliver it to the user. Every seller is charged for returns/replacements as well and so it would be kind of confusing and arbitrary if they just returned the product on the way to delivery.
I've had Amazon attempt (but fail to) intercept a package in transit--it was going to be too late, I had cancelled the order and bought it locally. When the shipping e-mail showed up we were on the other side of the world, nobody was around to get $500 of stuff off our porch. Fortunately, no porch pirates and no rain, it was fine when we got home.
> HP ignored my questions about how many customers were affected and why it repeatedly gave you false information. It stated merely that all affected customers had been notified. It says: “We are taking steps to ensure we deliver the first-class experience customers can expect from HP at all times, including with regard to communications with specific customers.”
Corporate speak, especially when it is directly contrary to reality, is so frustrating.
It hardly matters who's legally right and who's wrong here. The fact is, HP was once a class act. I wish I could find the writeup about the early HP35 calculator bug, where it was suggested that they just sweep it under the rug, and either Hewlett or Packard himself said no, we're going to do the right thing and fix every calculator we've shipped, period. That same boss would have said, it was our mistake, so we're going to honour the offer. A few hundred thousand bucks down the drain, but stellar reputation maintained.
It takes a long time, and makes a lot of profit, to run such a reputable brand into the ground. By the look of it, the process is nearly complete.
In those days HP was selling specialized equipment to a small market of specialists, and brand reputation was key. If HP were only selling to the HN crowd, they'd have been out of business years ago.
But now they're in the consumer staple industry. A new crop of highschool and college students are minted every year, and the negative signal simply will not reach them. They will see the ads for HP and see it as just another of several interchangeable brands (like automobiles or Android phones).
I don't think it's quite that simple, like almost all large manufacturers HP have different tiers of quality/prices to address different markets. Just as you say they have price sensitive models but they also have "price is not the main thing" models.
That's not to say that any of HP's laptops are a good buy in the first place but it true for every manufacturer that there are a range of qualities and prices.
The exception to this is Apple because they have distinctive approach to marketing which, in the laptop field, is unique (or if it's not unique I can't think of any other 'single tier' manufacturers).
It could've been the best laptop on the planet and still would not buy. These guys are selling scanners that won't scan because "low ink". I'm going to assume the webcam will stop working after 100 battery cycles because .. power limits or something.
Having just finished watching "Pepsi, where's my jet?" on Netflix, all I can say is fuck Pepsi, and now fuck HP. I'm sick and tired of these big companies thinking they can run roughshod all over the world and their C-suite fat cats thinking they own the world and can do anything they want and not be beholden to the law.
They had a draft version that was obvious a joke and set the price 100x higher. They lowered it to get people excited about the prospect of actually getting the jet.
In other countries, like Canada, they also ran with a disclaimer.
It wasn't obviously a joke. At the time the expenditure on actually providing it would have been ground breaking, but not too many years later marketing spends were high enough that it would have been a reasonable cost of business (and a phenomenal promotion to actually do it). There are even insurance programs now that focus on fringe outcomes in marketing campaigns, specifically so you can have unlikely to be claimed grand prizes at a managed level of risk.
In fact, I believe Pepsi's loss on the jet would have been pretty similar to the Taco bell 2001 MIR splashdown promotion (where they offered free tacos to every American if MIR hit their target).
No it's not. Maybe if you're talking about a contest, but if you're talking about straight up exchanging cash for the jet like the kid tried, it's obviously a joke.
Even by your logic: Do you also think there was only one pair of sunglasses? One duffel bag? So why one jet?
Spoiler alert on the documentary, they had caveats on the canadian version of the ad but had deliberately put a lower number on the US ad to make it feel more real. Etc. The ad designer was saying 'don't put me on the stand'.
Obviously a joke, eh? A commercial pitched to adolescents? A company that fought tooth and nail to make sure the case never made it to a jury trial? What's Pepsi so afraid of?
You should be ashamed of yourself for being a corporate stooge.
For reference, you can buy an HP laptop (14" Chromebook) at Costco for $230. So 399 quid ($500) seems not outside the realms of possibility for a specially discounted 17" machine.
It's pretty clear to me that even to HP employees, that bargain wasn't "too good to be true". And putting them through all that crap over it? Yeah, no.
I'm a little impressed that HP stuck to its guns once the newspaper called. Usually once something looks like it is about to become a PR problem, the calculation is made that losing a few bucks on a single purchase is the cheaper option. Instead, now we're all taking about how shitty they are.
It's not the core of the story, but man: how HP have degenerated as a company. They were a gold standard for the quality of how they ran as a company and the products they sold. Now look at them.
Yes it is seriously sad. Today they are to be avoided at almost any price. But when I bought my HP48SX, it was my most loved possession, and the company checked all boxes.
Oh, they will try ( I'm looking at you, Dell), but you can quite easily stick by your guns and refuse to accept anything other than product delivery. If they have taken your money they have to provide the goods or an appropriate replacement.
If they keep refusing you can start reporting them to various authorities such as ACCC and they start wearing penalties and have to deliver anyway.
Under German law, I think HP would have been fine. I think the important part is that (apparently) HP made a mistake when they put out that special offer. Whether or not a customer should be able to recognize it as such is secondary.
How quickly? What if the defect with the laptop isn't readily apparent and this is because the company has intentionally crafted their product in such a way so that the defect doesn't reveal itself to the customer until after the legally mandated warranty/return period?
Then you have to ask the seller to repair it for up to 2 years (1 year the manufacturer has to prove you destroyed the device if he does not want to repair it, 2 year you have to prove that's it's a manufacturing defect)
After 3 attempts, they have to give you your money back.
If the product is actually defect, you can return it even after the 14 days are over. With electronic devices, manufacturers must provide a mandatory warranty of two years.
That depends, did you buy it online? Then you can return the laptop basically no question asked for 14 days. There are some exceptions for custom orders, but I have never seen those enforced for anything not majorly custom build.
Offline you do not have this right, but a lot of retailers still have money back/voucher guarantees for 14 days.
Take this with a grain of salt, the law is pretty old in Germany and I have heard different things why it was introduced. Also the eu directive is lot newer.
- you can try things out in a shop, you can't online
- it comes from door salesman
Which liked to pressure people into buying stuff
- was extended to support local businesses as an added cost to sell online
>Could Lands End have kept its lifetime return policy in Germany under this law?
Don't know about that policy/any details, but sure.. why not?
Laws only define a minimum, not a maximum service level
I'm not sure about Germany. In the US, probably. It's not usually laws as much as stores having very generous return policies. To be fair, this was in the UK, so customs and laws are different.
Under Russian law, too. IIRC you must sell the item at the price you displayed even if it's wrong. You can add an * and thousands of words of small print though.
There's a good summary for the US here [1]. The most relevant parts:
> Assuming that an incorrect advertised price is truly an error rather than an attempt to deceive, companies are only obligated to honor it if a customer makes an offer at that price and the company accepts it. This exchange creates a contract between buyer and seller.
> In a store, customers make an offer simply by indicating they want to buy an item – for example, by bringing it up to the register – and the company accepts the offer by ringing up the sale. In the brick-and-mortar world, contracts don't get formed around pricing errors because the store just won't ring up the sale. But online selling, in which transactions are processed automatically, has added a new layer of complexity to the issue.
and
> When an e-commerce website has had an incorrect price entered into its database, it can end up not only advertising that price but also accepting orders and charging customers' credit cards for that amount. The central issue here is whether retailers can void the contract created when orders were accepted.
> The easiest way for a company to deal with such situations is to have website "terms of use" that clearly state the company can cancel orders and refund customers' money because of pricing errors (or for any reason). Otherwise, a common law doctrine known as "unilateral mistake of fact" applies. This doctrine allows a party to a contract to set aside the contract if honoring it would be "unconscionable," or if the other party could have reasonably assumed it was a mistake. A $1,000 item advertised for $10 likely would meet this definition.
So, according to the article "a contract was formed", but despite that HP gets away with just giving them "20% off"?
If there really was a contract he should sue HP to honor it, my understanding is in the UK loser pays legal fees, so if he's sure about contract law there's no downside (I would suggest double checking the law on this though).
A newspaper intervented and arranged for an amicable resolution. If they had taken this to court, I'm sure they'd have won, but they were happy to accept a refund plus a voucher, so they didn't.
The 20% off voucher is a slap in the face, though. I'd never come out of this situation and still buy a laptop from HP, so it's effectively nothing.
Loser pays legal fees once they lose, until then you're on the hook. And there's always the chance you will lose. HP (or, insert big entity here) has too much money to throw at lawyers, so usually it does not really make sense for a small party to sue a big one. Better to just accept the loss, walk away, and go do something more productive than generate more income for lawyers.
> And this is why Texas allows for small claims court, where no lawyers are allowed for either side [...]
Are you sure about that? The small claims FAQ [1] on the Texas State Law Library site says lawyers are allowed. It cites section 500.4 of the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure.
Looking at the Texas RCP, it looks like small claims is defined by rule 500.3, which among other things says small claims cases are governed by Rules 500-507, so 500.4 would apply as stated in the FAQ.
Most states actually allow attorneys in small claims court. But even in a state that doesn't allow attorneys it probably doesn't matter. That's because it is usually easy to appeal small claims decisions, so if you lose in small claims court but think you would have won if only you had had an attorney you can appeal. The appeal is heard in regular court.
Of course. Small Claims process in the UK has a fee of about 10% of claim value and covers claims up to £10,000. If you win the other party has to repay those fees. No legal fees allowed. So would be the right process here - presumably as HP are in breach of contract the laptop buyer would win a case for a claim of the extra cost of the same laptop at full price.
Even if it was too good to be true, I suspect that the sending of a confirmation by the company makes it a valid contract. Law famously doesn't take into account the proportionality of consideration - which is why the famous 'peppercorn rent' exists. [1]
Agree. It's about whether a buyer would reasonably expect the price to be correct.
UK law for consumer goods and sales, I would say generally doesn't require the buyer to be an expert. Laptops are items that are frequently included in sales and clearance sales at 50% off or more do happen. £400 is still a normal price to pay for a laptop. So I'd say the buyer could reasonably expect a laptop discounted to £400 to be the correct price, therefore HP were unreasonable to try to blame the buyer.
I have to assume this was not only one person, HP doesn't do anything for one person, so I'd have to imagine at a few hundred (or thousand) at least went out. This doesn't seem even that good a deal, the cheapest model, which I'd have to presume this to be is $649 US currently, so I can't imagine it was even worth their effort to action something like this, literally mass recalling them from the delivery trucks en route like they screwed up and sent everyone a $3000 laptop.
More like some middle manager forced some random behavior because they screwed up the listing and didn't want to be held accountable to their boss personally.
If it were actually worth more, it would be interesting to get in touch with others that had the same crap pulled on them and get HP on the TV news for being a Christmas Grinch and just a really nasty company in general for doing so to customers.
As said, this could be construed as illegal behavior if anyone bothered to lawyer up for it, but for 300-400 return, just swear never to buying anything HP again, and tell all your friends what scum they are. I have never had anyone have a good experience with an HP laptop, consumer low-end ones particularly, and already tell everyone I know to avoid them if asked.
I don't know the specifics of the law here, but it seems problematic that a company would be legally considered the owners of an item that you have purchased and be able to unilaterally rescind your contract until it has arrived on your doorstep.
1. Who determines when the item transitions from their property to yours? It seems reasonable that it would be when they accept payment for your item, but it apparently isn't.
2. If the transition occurs at the customer's door, does this mean that a parcel delivered to the wrong location (let's say, a neighbor's door) is theirs? Does mere proximity legally make the item yours? Does the carrier decide to whom the item belongs, and, if so, when? I actually don't believe the "refused delivery" story because it superficially appears to be the only legal loophole that would allow the vendor to retain property of the item.
3. I'm not sure that it's equitable to allow a company to take a relatively non-trivial amount of money from a consumer and give them unilateral leverage in the contract. Even $100 is a non-trivial amount of money for a consumer of even modest wealth, whereas $100 worth of goods for a company is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percentage of value for even a modest merchant. If the aim of the law is to promote equity, it seems like a greater, not equal, onus would be placed on a merchant.
On the whole I’m much happier with convention being that the company owns the object being sold until a courier hands it over to you, especially in a world where most companies are selecting their courier based on who the lowest bidder is rather than quality of service.
In your world, let’s say the lowest bidder courier has an overloaded route, and decides to toss your laptop into a river while claiming to have made delivery to your neighbour. You’re now on the hook to chase this down and get a refund for the value of the laptop. In my world I call up the sender and say “hey, your courier fucked up” and it’s now their problem. If they don’t fix it I run a chargeback of the card payment because the item I bought never arrived.
Why wouldn't it be contingent on the vendor to properly safeguard and transport your property?
I can send my Rolex into a shop for repair, or hand it over physically, and I'm pretty sure I'm protected from someone throwing it into the Hudson river without it becoming their property.
Just to note, most deliveries are contactless so a company really isn't capable of proving this supposed transfer of ownership.
Seems like a nightmare for the company and the consumer.
Seems on par with HP common operating procedure. A decade ago we ordered a couple of laptops that were discounted by 15%. The story on the website was they were a generation past their prime, so they were new laptops being sold at a discount.
When they arrived we discovered the keyboards didn't work. HP refused to honor their warranty commitment.
HP was removed from our vendor list and that of the California state government agency we were providing support services for.
I wonder how far up the HP org chart that decision (to call back a direct sale shipment from the shipper) was made.
Maybe doing so was aligned with that person's OKRs or KPIs, whether or not they considered that this would plausibly lead to complaints on social media (or to a news org consumer columnist?) that'd hurt the brand.
If they sold 1 laptop at a 1000 loss due to a mistake of theirs, it's probably more cost effective to let it go. If they sold 1000 of them, maybe they were debating the reputation damage vs the economic loss: with those numbers at least one of the unfortunate customers would make the mistake and the mishandling very public.
That is indeed the law in the UK, and applied to this story. The key thing here is that the customer ('MM') explicitly entered their side of the contract by clicking 'purchase' and providing payment details on HP's website. HP could have declined at this point: their original email and special offer website was only an 'invitation to treat'. But in sending an order confirmation message to MM, HP had chosen to sell - and thus made a valid contract.
Perhaps HP should have a human representative approving each offer and entering into contracts manually. However, I can't see that being likely or (from HP's point of view) entirely satisfactory.
Edit: here is a US example, advertised as "Save 75%" https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-elitebook-x360-1040-g8-... (I have no idea if this is a good deal or not, point is that such "savings" are a common occurence)