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The $54 Million Laptop
Stanislav_J writes "It happens to the best of us: you drop off your laptop at the local branch of some Super Mega Electronics McStore, go to pick it up, and they can't find it. Lost, gone, kaput — probably sucked into a black hole and now breeding with lost airline luggage. It would make any of us mad, but Raelyn Campbell of Washington, D.C. isn't just mad — she's $54 million mad. That's how much she is asking from Best Buy in a lawsuit that seeks 'fair compensation for replacement of the $1,100 computer and extended warranty, plus expenses related to identity theft protection.' Best Buy claims that Ms. Campbell was offered and collected $1,110.35 as well as a $500 gift card for her inconvenience. (I guess that extra 35 cents wasn't enough to sway her.) Her blog claims that Geek Squad employees spent three months telling her different stories about where her laptop might be before finally acknowledging that it had been lost. For those who follow economic trends, this means that a laptop's worth is roughly equivalent to that of a pair of pants."
First, @drcagn:
When you bring a laptop in for service at a Best Buy (which I have done), it says right on the service receipt data may and probably will be lost. They offer a back-up service for a fee. So she can pound sand about losing data (and so can Washington DC.)
Second, if she had sensitive data on her laptop it is her responsibility to encrypt and back it up. Having someone steal your laptop or losing it is an issue whether you take your laptop in to service or not (not to mention the info just getting stolen via some other means, i.e. trojan.)
Third, if she lost other peoples data because her business involves it (which I don't see asserted) then it is definitely her responsibility to encrypt it. I work with sensitive data and my company requires full disk encryption and a bios driven password to get at it.
Last, many laptop mfrs require that you send the unit back to them for repair or no parts for you! Now you have UPS and a third party involved. The thing will likely go on tour and take forever to repair. In that time, sh#t happens. Not to mention, the mfr will almost always restore the drive even if the repair had nothing to do with it and you tell them not to.
They effectively offered her a new laptop with a cherry on top, what else would they do?
People applaud this type of BS and fail to recognize that frivolous lawsuits like this just drive up the cost of doing business.
You don't think that cost is passed on to you?
$54 million lawsuit was supposed to do what? Open our eyes to poor service? That people being paid 8 bucks an hour screw up? Wow, thanks for opening up our eyes. It seems she is just another friggen media whore, out for more than she deserves.
Even if you accept what she says as truth, she's off her rocker.
Disclosure: I have purchased three laptops at Best Buy. I always buy the warranty, because I actually use my laptops for travel. I have had all three laptops serviced under the warranty, due to what I would consider wear-and-tear issues (which are covered).
There are several problems with this lawsuit.
First, Best Buy has no responsibility for the data lost. We all know that when you send in your computer for repair that unless you have some ueber data protection plan, data is not the repair shop's responsibility.
Second, I don't see where best buy has any responsibility for any privacy implications either. It's not like someone broke into Best Buy's database and accessed information collected and stored by Best Buy. Someone stole a customer laptop with the customer's hard drive on it. Best Buy has no way of knowing what data is on that hard drive, and frankly, if there IS private, sensitive information on the hard drive, that is again the customer's problem, not Best Buy's. Best Buy can't be responsible for the contents of a hard drive they shouldn't even be looking at the contents of. And, there's no reason to notify you that your data is on the loose when you already know you gave someone your hard drive with data.
Third, the warranty terms are pretty clear on what the warranty is good for. Replacement of the laptop with a like laptop. So no matter how broke or lost her laptop is, all she is entitled to is replacement of the laptop with a similar model.
As a consumer, there is also an obligation to endure inconvenience in the event of a problem. It definitely sucks, but if you have something that breaks, you're going to have the inconvenience of missing that item for a while while it is fixed and/or replaced. Go buy a computer at Dell - you get a basic warranty for free (1 year parts and workmanship) and then if it's important to you, you can PAY for additional coverages like next-day replacement etc. That's a good thing - it let's the people who don't need that reliability get laptops cheaper and lets the people who do need it pay for it to have it.
So it seems like what we're really talking about here is some best buy employees did not act in the best manner. It took the woman longer than it should have to get her laptop back. The flow of information is poor. She was given a bad customer experience. A $500 gift card for a bad customer experience seems to be entirely reasonable compensation. For example, I recently had a plane flight canceled by the airline for operational reasons. They didn't communicate the situation to me very well, causing me to spend an extra 8 hours at the airport. They gave me a free, extremely restricted, travel voucher, worth about $250. I found this to be reasonable - enough for me to believe that I had experienced an isolated customer service problem, because if the airline gave out $250 and this happened often they'd be out of business.
$500 to me says "We know we screwed up and we're sorry."
$54 million says "I'm a self-centered bitch." Best Buy doesn't need to address their customer privacy issues - they already have a perfectly good system in place. The system is "If you have data that is important to you on your hard drive, back it up or don't give it to us."
paintball
Yes - she did accept payment, the gift certificate. That she donated it to charity is irrelevant.
If the law says they have to cover it they have to cover it, no discussion.
The WHOLE POINT is that the law DOES NOT SAY THEY HAVE TO COVER IT! Neither the data loss as in gone nor the data loss as in unauthorized access.
So...
ARE YOU UNABLE TO COMPREHEND THAT IF THE LAW DOES NOT SAY THEY HAVE TO COVER IT, THAT THEY DO NOT HAVE TO COVER IT?
We're not talking about whether or not Best Buy did the right thing. We're talking about whether or not th lawsuit is either reasonable or has merit. It has no merit, and is not reasonable. The appropriate remedy for a bad business experience in which you receive a full refund is to take your business elsewhere.
paintball
* The dry cleaners that he was suing found his pants. This lady's laptop is still lost.
Okay, so the remedy for a lost laptop is to be compensated for the value of the laptop when it was given into Best Buy's possession, same as with any property you give into someone else's keeping for a time. If you drop your car off at the mechanic and they accidentally drop it in a car crusher, you get the Blue Book value (or thereabouts) of your car.
* The dry cleaners offered to reimburse him $12,000, which is orders of magnitude more than what his pants cost. Best Buy is lowballing this lady.
Not really. If she paid $1100 for the laptop new, plus $300 for a warranty, then their offer of $1100 in monetary compensation plus $500 store credit is more than reasonable.
* The dry cleaners were a small business, and the money he was asking for would have closed their shop down and permanently saddled them with debt. Best Buy is a major corporation that can afford this payout. It will sting them, but not completely bankrupt them.
So what. Best Buy breached a contract, plain and simple. The remedy for breach of contract is to be compensated for the damages you actually suffer, unless the conduct is so ridiculously negligent that punitive damages are merited (I have other beefs about punitive damages, but I won't go into them here). That should apply regardless of how deep the pockets are that you're trying to reach into. Best Buy may have lost her laptop - heck, one of their employees may have it at home or may have sold it for crack money, who knows. But even stalling about it for three months doesn't mean that the plaintiff was any more damaged than she would have been had they owned up to it right away.
* Crazy Pants Guy probably didn't have his social security and bank account numbers in his pants when he dropped them off. This lady probably did have such information on her laptop.
This is pretty much the only valid reason to ask the court to give the woman additional compensation, but this is dependent specifically upon DC law which specifies that the plaintiff can recover actual damages, plus court costs and reasonable attorney's fees. If actual damages turn out to be very low, the court might decide that much of the attorney's fees here are unreasonable.
* Crazy Pants Guy didn't pay $300 to guarantee that should something happen to his pants, he should be treated particularly well. This lady did.
Then the breach of the warranty contract should result in that $300 being returned to the plaintiff as damages.
* To my knowledge, Crazy Pants Guy didn't approach the dry cleaners and try to make nice with a good-faith offer to make things right. This lady did.
That's just the thing - her request wasn't reasonable, even from the outset, when she was asking for compensation in an amount that was well within the limits of a small-claims court's jurisdiction (to wit, $2110.35). She was attempting to get compensation not just for the computer itself (at the full retail price she paid for it a year earlier!) or the warranty fee, but for "pictures and music she couldn't replace" despite signing an agreement that Best Buy wouldn't be held responsible for her data, and for "time wasted being lied to," etc. etc.
Even if her request at the time was reasonable, it ballooned into an amount more than 25000 times as much (and, if you ignore the ludicrous $54 million portion of her current lawsuit, she's still asking the court to award her roughly 100 times as much as her original settlement offer. This is RIAA legal tactics, pure and simple, but somehow she gets away with it in the court of Slashdot opinion.