Are you saying that nobody breaks the law in Australia?
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.
That’s right, we got it out of our system more than a century ago.
(TBH for a country settled by supposed crims, Aus is a surprisingly law abiding place)
Everyone makes mistakes and that fact is recognized under German law for situations like that (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erkl%C3%A4rungsirrtum). But of course, the customer should then be reimbursed.
All too often large companies can make these kinds of 'mistakes' while the consumer can't.
> 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.
[1] https://smallbusiness.chron.com/company-advertising-price-wr...
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"?
This all just seems so random.
Immediately realized it could be used for fraud by pretending to prove the shipment.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Royal Mail has some types of tracked packages that can be redirected by the poster.
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).
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.
Interested to know if something similar exists in the UK?
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.
Without reading the contract, we cannot know. But given that the context was constructed by HP, there are likely multiple legal escapes.
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)
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).
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).
You should be ashamed of yourself for being a corporate stooge.
Voucher? So you have to spend more money on HP products to claim a shitty 20% for HP having broken contract law? Am I interpreting this correctly?
If so, wow.
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.
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).
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.
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.
People make mistakes and just because it's a big anonymous company to the author doesn't mean there are people behind mistakes.
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.
HP Envy laptop: "Price starting at $1,299.99 - Save $600.00 - $699.99".[1]
50%-75% price reductions in laptops are not rare.
That said, the real question is how many people pulled the trigger on this...
$500 fat finger markdown * 100 people = $50k. Now, 1k people...10k people...
And MOST importantly, what would you do if you were HP?
I don't know about you, but I would be calling corporate lawyers for options and pressing the brakes once it got past my paycheck in losses.
Corporate speak, especially when it is directly contrary to reality, is so frustrating.
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.
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.
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.
