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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."
* 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.