Slashdot Mirror
NZ Business Fined For Out-of-Date Website
Peter writes "A story reports that a restaurant in New Zealand has been fined NZ$3000 for failing to keep its website up to date. By having out-of-date menus and prices on its website, it has breached the Fair Trading Act, according to the New Zealand Commerce Commission."
As long as you don't sell things and claim they cost less than they actually do, there shouldn't be a problem.
The internet is a mature medium. The restaurant was warned about it, and they failed to do anything. It's an open and shut case of false advertising. Would you tolerate your brokerage firm listing out of date brokerage fees? Or your bank listing out of date interest rates?
E = m c^3 Don't drink and derive E = m c^3
Exactly why is a web site a special case from other forms of promotion and advertising?
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
To some extent, they have a point in that it is bad for companies to advertise things and not actually have all of what they do advertise. But that hardly calls for a 3000 dollar fine. Especially for something as non-critical as food. It's not like someone paid a 1000 bucks to live in some hotel that didn't have A/C but said it did. That would be a better case. Not people whining about some food item thats not available at the store that was published online. And seriously .. "the website price varied between 17 and 36 per cent cheaper than the in-house menu." -- ?? 15 - 30 cents? Pocket change anyone?
I'd take exception to this if it were just a matter of the owner once having a website done up and then forgot about it. But the restaurant was warned not only by the customer who complained but also by the restaurant assocation. Even after all that, nothing was done. So it's clearly false advertising.
And, once again, this has *nothing* to do with my rights online. How's that Legal section coming along, Taco?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Yeah, and Frys would get fined alot
This is why I always recommend to my customers to include in the fine print: "Prices are subject to change without notice."
At that point, I would hope the company is no longer liable for a customer's stupidity.
I don't want to get in trouble for not keeping all of my numerous sites up to date.
Are those personal sites? No worries. You can let them rot and maybe your friends and family will bug you. But if they are business-related sites for an active business such as the restaurant in this article, then you DO have a responsibility to either keep the site up to date, or make it obvious that the site is inaccurate and people coming to your shop should be prepared for different prices and availability. If you are a business owner, you have a responsibility not to advertise falsely, in whatever manner you choose to advertise.
It's not unlike putting out a pile of ads for people to pick up which list your prices as of half a year ago. If your prices are significantly different, you don't carry half those items any more, etc. then you are indeed falsely advertising. The difference is that an old flyer usually appears physically old, but a website can hide its age.
This goes back to the days of "Bait and Switch" advertising in newspapers back in the 70's. Certainly, if the restaurant posted prices, then they do have a legitimate responsibility to keep that sort of "Time Sensitive" information up to date.
"The complaining customer had notified both the restaurant and the Restaurant Association of New Zealand that the website menu was out of date and misleading, but the operator, despite knowing about the issue, had done nothing to correct the website."
This sends a good message to commercial web site operators and e-commerce sites that they have to maintain current and correct information and can't just say "We didn't have time to update things.....so not our problem"
I don't think I need to worry about my blog I set up one weekend a couple months ago and haven't touched since......do I ???"We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. " Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Well, US is not known for the high level of consumer rights. But I do foresee similar cases in some country in the EU where they have reasonably effective consumer protection laws and authorities.
Amen!
If you advertise rates and don't meet them, you're wrong. I can understand "forgetting" to update your site, but once someone told you about it and it still goes uncorrected? There has to be some responsibility on the part of the advertisor (regardless of the medium) to make things right. Internet ads still account for billions of dollars world wide, and this is no different than a regular print or TV ad.
There have to be warnings in place prior to sanctions - Again, there is always the possibility of an oversight, especially in the case of a company that doesn't use the web as their primary advertising method, but once notified, fix it for Gods sake!
I was ready to come down hard here, but after I RTFA, I don't have a problem with this.
>In other news, the Staten Island Ferry was fined >$30,000 after a customer got in line clutching a >rate card from 1958.
If they were handing them out without telling anyone they were old, that would be a valid fine. The website was still up, they were warned about it, they did nothing. Can you say "bait and switch"?
False advertising on the Internet is still false advertising, no new laws are needed, it is illegal in any medium. In general things illegal in one medium are illegal in all, unless the law specifies otherwise.
This isn't a rights or "Internet" or online case primarily, it is a case of false representations that happened to be on the Internet. Not fundamentally different than if it had been in a newspaper or radio ad, or a billboard, etc.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Yeah, then maybe Slashdot would get fined for all those dupes and old stories.
Why? If you advertise rates and folks discover that they aren't correct, how long will people continue to buy from them? You folks need a lesson in market theory. If I find a company doesn't do good business, I halt my business with them. I don't demand that someone force them to do business with me the way I want it done, it is, after all, their business, and if they want to treat their customers poorly, they won't be in business long.
The people who put up that website should have just put in 5 point font a "valid until YYYY" like you do with any print ad. When doing any sort of advertising people should really think of the limitations of what they offer and spell them out clearly. The problem is that many people do not think of a webpage with the same througness as they do an ad in a newspaper.
Thanks, Ayn. I'll see your hypothetical and raise you this: If you live in a country without adequate consumer-protection laws, how many times will you get burned before you decide to move to a place where you have legal protections against this sort of stuff?
Libertarian paradises, where they have existed, have tended to be almost as horrible places to live as communist paradises. People don't just vote with their wallets; they vote with their feet too.
"Is your website out of date? You could be fined $3000! Instead, pay us to update your site!"
Makes me wish this would happen in the US.
(flamebait) :-)
Another Bush term ought to do it
(/flamebait)
Well then, why don't we start calling police officers "lawyers", and military aircraft pilots "commandoes".
The word Engineer means something. It denotes a level of legal and professional obligation to one's work that does not necessarily exist in other careers. When an individual software developer becomes personally legally responsible for the performance of his company's product, then he can call himself an engineer.
That kind of legal liability don't sound fun? Well then, don't be champing at the bit to get to call yourself "engineer". Its not a snobbery thing, its a safety thing: a person knows that, if they hire an engineer to do something, then they're legally required to stand behind their work. As such, certain jobs require an Engineer, not an "engineer" - this is much like how a person can have a doctorate in biology and extensive medical knowledge, but can't practice legally as a medical doctor. Its for safety reasons - he might be every bit the doctor as the real, certified person, but he has not sworn to the hippocratic oath, he does not have malpractice insurance set up, and various other considerations of accountability may not exist. Also, the state did not keep as close an eye on his medical training. Engineering programs are inspected.
The whole Engineer licensing thing didn't start because of a bunch of engineers wanting to stroke their egos. It started because of a series of catastrophes where nobody was accountable.
So, if you are not designing safety-critical systems, there's no reason to want to call yourself an engineer, unless you just like the fancy word. It is not just a fancy word - abusing it is just like people who use the word "literally" for emphasis.
It doesn't matter how 'stupid' or 'naive' the customers are. False advertising is false advertising. It amuses me how some people here think that otherwise illegal activities are suddenly fine if they're done using a computer.
If as a business owner you don't like it, then the real solution, rather than to bitch and moan about those evil trade laws, is to advertise real information rather than false information. I mean, I can't think that any business anywhere has any excuse for knowingly advertising false information.
Alternatively you can just point out that free markets tend to work best when the parties involved in a transaction have as information as possible. Introducing false information distorts transactions and harms the efficiency of the free market. Requiring truth in avertising is helping the maximise the efficiency of the market.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
This sounds like it has the potential to be a great money spinner for Slashdot users with a litigious streak and zero sympathy for the non-computer/Internet literate.
There are thousands of "mom and pop" businesses out there who paid a webmaster to make them a site as a one-off after being bombarded with the message that their business will go under if they don't join the 21st century and get an Internet presence. Once their contract with the webmaster expires, these sites often sit dormant for years. The owners of these businesses are typically working their asses off on the fundamentals to stay afloat, and it's probable that many barely recall the fact that they have a (rather pointless) Internet presence, let alone know how to update the site, or have the spare cash to hire a webmaster just to update a few details.
So here's what we do. We seek these sites out, send an e-mail to their long since unmonitered account complaining that we were misled because the site's details are not up-to-date, and sue the pants off them when there is no response. And we don't have to feel the least bit bad about our nuisance lawsuits tying up the overburdened court system, because after all, these greedy small businesses maliciously attempted to deceive people, and we're just doing our bit to eliminate this evil from the world.
(Say) I own a restaurant. I've been in restaurant business for 28 years, but just recently this young man approached me about a "web-site" thing. I don't know diddly-squat about computers and such, but it's cheap. I pay him $500 and sets up a web-site for me. All is wonderful...
Later, I get notice that my web-site thing is "wrong" but I can no longer reach the guy that made it? What do I do??????
[I in fact know people who have web sites set up for their business by short-lived companies. The web sites often live on, longer than their creators. The "owners" who paid to have them created may not know HOW to change them.]
PK: 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
If you know a few business-owners (esp restaurant owners), you'll agree that some are utterly clueless on IT and economic/finance practices. What if this guy really is just clueless?
This NZ$3000 case isn't an ideal case for what I'm saying, but what about the precedent? This potentially sets a legal and public-opinion precedent that I'm not thrilled with:
- First precedent: publishing specific details are risky on your website, because you can be held accountable long after you've forgotten that you ever created some orphan page. Think I'm crazy? Imagine a one-time web ad: 'throughout june, mention this ad and get a surf-n-turf special for $12.95'.... oops, no year. Now, your cut-rate $50-per-modification webmaster cuts the link in July, but leaves the html on the server for your/his future reuse, and some webcrawler never forgets it. As I said, 'In other news, the Staten Island Ferry was fined $30,000 after a customer got in line clutching a rate card from 1958.'
- Screwed by a gift: a friend/customer/admirer or some wannabe offers you a bargain website? Turn it down, because they might not give you keys to the site, maintain it, etc., but you'll be held responsible. Or, in my facetious tone, '...it was discovered that, in a locked, donated trunk of old books and papers, they had been in posession of WWII-era Nazi propaganda.'
- Killed by bad press: even a lame claim against a PR-dependent company can
do massive damage. And PETA's founder was forced to resign today after it was learned his father once ate a steak. Rare.
My original post was off-the-cuff, but I'll stand by it, even if it does mean another round of moderator smack-down. This is one of those road-to-hell / good-intentions things. Worse, the commission/judge used buzz-phrases that made them sound like a bad web-advertising seminar from '98, they seem oblivious to international issues, they don't seem aware of the high cost of content maintenance, etc. Meanwhile, sensible web marketing advice like datestamp or expiration notices never got mentioned and they're making legal precedents that are easily abused.Suing a company for old, orphaned, or flawed webpages creates a small barrier against entry. It gives an avenue for large firms to hammer on smaller/weaker competitors (into oblivion) for insufficient detail or inaccuracies online. If they act defensively, they publish less detail, and we lose detailed data because of the maintenance costs.
Would you rather price information for some shops be utterly unavailable online? Is that the stance of everyone disagreeing with me here? 'Cuz we risk a subtle chilling effect happening if the 'net is policed for accuracy, whether by a government commission or by competitors given more leeway to frivolously sue.
Would the restaurant's site be sufficiently fixed if a tiny bit of print said: 'last updated 21-Sept-2004'? Because I can't count the number of restaurants, bars and arts venues, online stores, peer-review sites and newspaper/magazine-based reviews that have some small bit of out-of-date info on the 'net.
Hell, even this story suffers the time-distortion effects of the web: it was old enough news that I literally found 130 copies of the story on the web. Apparently, nerds are among the last to know that this happened in February.
Would you rather only *large* companies advertise online? Because that's another risk: if you can't afford to pay for the maintenance, don't advertise online. Also, if you can't afford to have your ad vetted for legal risks, don't run it.
Would yu want your favorite hangout to take the PR hit for being 'under investigation' or for news that they're being sued by a customer?
This is a naive comment. Firstly, consumer-protection laws are a recent innovation, legally speaking, and when first implemented (the early 1900s in the US) varied widely in their scope and degree of enforcement, not only between (for example) the US and Europe, but among the several United States. No historian worthy of the name has suggested any significant migration patterns in 1900s America driven by varying levels of consumer protection law. I think just stating the proposition out loud like that is more likely to provoke ha-ha than a-ha.
.) The legal costs for entrepreneurship would just soar out of sight. You forget that safe consumers without successful vendors is just another name for a Neanderthal society. If you want daring business innovation, you have to accept the occasional consumer fraud. Frequently enough, the difference between a really clever idea and a really sneaky scam is damn hard to detect ahead of time, when you're drafting the laws.
Secondly, I defy you to actually name a libertarian paradise or otherwise provide evidence for your wild general assertion, not to even mention your contradiction of the much milder assertion (which the parent made) that "consumer protection" laws that significantly compromise freedom of speech and freedom of contract in the name of "the truth" (and what is truth, eh, Pilate?) are worth the inevitable social cost.
Just try asking yourself what "truth in advertising" would do to your dating life. Or imagine if the government could force you to defend (at enormous expense) any minor random claim you made about your nifty new software any time they wanted to. ("More secure than Windows!" Oh yeah? Prove it! Time to write a few $1 mil checks to the lawyers. .
No one likes being lied to, but if it does happen, the socially efficient solution is either voting with your wallet, or with your feet (as you say, amongst other grandious silliness), or at most a private claim for damages based on a breach of explicit or implied contract. Inviting government oversight of even the most tenuous implied contract is a recipe for statist disaster.
Some things are indeed best left to individual negotation and common bloody sense.
if you add a date to your website (and indicate how long pricing remain valid), you should be safe... It's like advertising in a newspaper. Nobody is going to try to use an advertisement you placed ten years ago against you. The same holds if you clearly indicate the date on your site... People can simply see that the prices are old... Same thing if you indicate that prices can be changed without notification...
This is a completely ass-backwards understanding of economics. Free markets cause informed consumers, not vice versa. What, you think capitalism doesn't work unless and until everyone tells a close approximation to the truth? That's nuts. If that were true, we'd still be living in caves. Humans are not by nature honest with each other.
Indeed, buyers and sellers have every motivation to lie to each other, and will do so in an unfree (e.g. Soviet) market as much as possible. But in a free market, entrepreneurs can easily drive liars out of business simply by hewing closer to the truth, because it's an obvious fact of economics that most business is repeat business, and an obvious fact of psychology that no one likes doing business with a liar.
Put it another way: adding false information to a product is just selling an inferior product. In a free market someone can and will come along and sell the same product without attaching a false information "feature." Then, with his "better quality" product he'll drive you out of business in no time. He'll have great fun and much success pointing out your lies in his own advertising. That is exactly what happens in modern American advertising. You can always count on Chevy to point out where Ford stretches the facts, or on Microsoft to keep the consumer thoroughly informed of the drawbacks of Mac OS X or Linux. These forces are far more powerful at keeping corporations honest than any fiddling oversight by the government.
Honesty naturally evolves in a free market because it is the only way for a business to survive in the long run. When markets are not free, public honesty tends to suffer greatly.
False advertisement is illegal, yes, but all states allow quite a lot of "puffery" (barely plausible exaggeration) in commercial speech. Caveat emptor is still the general law of the land, once you turn 18 and presumably have a head on your shoulders. Unless a seller makes a truly outrageous claim, you're generally toast in Court.
A far better approach, if legal approach one must take, is to argue that a contract was never finalized (because there was no "meeting of minds" about what was being sold), and hence you are entitled to void your side of the deal -- i.e. demand your money back.
This has nothing to do with any false advertising or consumer protection laws. It's just you reneging on the deal after the fact, based on the ancient English common law principle that no contract exists unless both parties are in substantial agreement as to the nature of the items being exchanged.
Nothing annoys me more than all the web sites out there that are out of date. However, if it's clearly out of date then is that really false advertising? Perhaps I just have a sense of what is out of date (well some of these web sites will have shocking 10 year old looking HTML so I'll disregard the information within seconds). Though if the web site owner were place a disclaimer saying "Prices current as of ", I don't see why they'd be liable 2 years later when they've forgotten to update prices. In any case, it probably makes sense for businesses to date any prices they publish, even in fine print. I'm guessing that the web site in question didn't do this.
What really annoys me more though is computer retailers who advertise online prices that are discounted to compensate for postage but when you walk into their store the prices are completely different. Perhaps I ought to tell 'em next time I notice that they're probably breaking fair trading laws and follow it up with the ACCC if they don't honour their prices.
Jeremy
Melbourne, Australia
Jabber Australia
"Alternatively you can just point out that free markets tend to work best when the parties involved in a transaction have as information as possible"
Not just tend, but information is necessary for the existence of a free market. Indeed one of the most valid criticisms of free market microeconomics (well even macro actually) is the assumption about perfect information. Without it, the market cannot be free.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
It is probably laziness, but if the restaurant owner does not want to spend time updating the web site, then (s)he should not present information that is likely to go out of date.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The biggest difference I can see is that your local computer store is likely to be quite willing to sell it's products at the out of date prices; but, the restaurant was not willing to sell it's products at the advertised price.
I fail to see why it's excusable to advertise false (lower)prices, just because it's on the Internet.
Here's a novel idea: If they didn't plan to update the prices on the site, how about not writing any prices on the site to start with? Prices are _not_ static constant content by any stretch of imagination. If they run a shop, mom-and-pop or not, they already know this.
I don't think they'd print a huge batch of menus/posters/fliers/whatever and keep using them for years after the prices changed, either. So they already _knew_ that prices change.
So sorry to rain on your parrade, but I don't see it as an excuse. Anyone who got made a web site by a web master, and saw _prices_ on that page, should have at least asked "well, what if those prices change"? Again, anyone who owns a shop or ever _worked_ in one even as a temp, that's the _first_ thing they learned about prices.
So here's a novel idea: if they werent malicious, they're complete cretins. And I fail to see why idiocy should be an excuse.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
No; quite the opposite. I think that the fine was quite right, because this story is a simple case of false advertising, and that the "restaurant fined for not updating their web pages" spin put on it by various news articles smells of having an agenda behind it.
Some of the stories about frivolous lawsuits that have been circulated allegedly have been planted or spun by corporate lobby groups with their own agenda (namely the rolling back of product-liability laws); hence my analogy. Both cases sound like soecial interest groups trying to marshal public opinion in favour of rolling back legislation that protects consumers from unfair business practices.
Put an prominent expiration date on all your web sites and you won't have this problem.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Or if it was a delivery? If the web page says your pizza will cost £10.00, would you be happy if the delivery boy wants £12.00 when he brings it?
I think he's kidding. Congress tends to have a habit of passing laws when it comes to the internet. X is illegal, but congress still passes a law defining X online as illegal ;)
You forgot the part where they make the punishment twice as bad in the process...