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In AU, Dodgy Dell Deal Faces Consumer Backlash
Ben Seberry writes "It appears Dell has been caught red-faced by yet another pricing mistake on their Australian website. Many customers thought they had spotted a fantastic deal when they came across a 55%-off offer. Dell later denied that this was a valid special and telephoned customers to offer them a choice of the standard price, or a cancelled order. Dell's senior manager of corporate communication came out and apologized for the mistake, promising processes would be reviewed to prevent it from happening again. In the days after the original 'incorrectly priced' offer was fixed, Dell made a different error leading to an even cheaper price being advertised. This time, on many user forums and blogs, users are debating Australian contract law as it applies to this matter — it is not as clear-cut as many originally believed."
I don't know about US economic laws but in Switzerland, if something is obviously too good to be true and there has been a mistake, the company can actually declare any contracts made invalid.
Or if it's a real life product in a real life windows with a hilariously low price, the sales people are not obligated to make the sale at that price.
So if it's too good to be true you'll have to expect it to actually BE too good to be true.
The tough question just is: Is 55% off unrealistic?
...with the Australian dollar near an all-time low.
Was this on any machines running Ubuntu?
Btw, what happened to the Dell+Ubuntu offers that I can no longer find on their site?
Or am I looking in the wrong place...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
As I write this, I am trying to make a call on my 24/7 , next business day business support package.
My Dell 9400 has crashed (just stopped working, screen goes crazy).
I have so far been on hold for over 50 minutes. Some guy verified me and just put me in queue.
(I have screen shots as I am using SKYPE).
On my other line, I call now and I am told they are closed and only available within a set of times. So if you have a 24/7 warranty, that means I have been ripped off, as you can't make a call 24/7. I notice the other countries can (and I have used them).
I used to rave about dell support which was the only BUSINESS reason to buy them, now I will just buy anywhere if there is not difference between them and others.... just another area DELL AU are not holding up their commitments.
...you can't trick me into buying Dell's shit. 55% off? They could be giving it away and i still wouldn't bite.
cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
This sounds like a tabloid current affairs headline...
"Dodgy Dell Deal Faces Dole Bludging Single Mum over Consumer Backlash in Shady Backroom Deal"
Global financial crisis worse than thought
Dell hardware cheap, but there may be some fine print
Paris Hilton shows her bits accidentally
I live in Melbourne, Australia. A well known consumer test magazine here, Choice, said about 20 years ago that an advertised or store-posted price was only "an invitation to enter into a contract of sale" and was not binding on the seller. That said, it is fairly common for most larger shops to give you the item at the advertised price when it is incorrect (i.e low). I once got six pieces of wood from a hardware shop that were marked at $4 each instead of $11 each. They pointed this out to me at the checkout and after checking that the rest of their stock was also marked at this price (not just mine ;-) ) gave it to me at this low price anyway.
In my opinion, it totally depends on how the company behaves. In the Netherlands, a flat-screen TV was advertised by a mail-order retailer for 100 euros. Many people ordered and the company proceeded to leave the advertisement online for more than a week. Despite that, the judge agreed with the retailer that they didn't need to respect the extremely low price. Later that same retailer made other errors. For example, when you'd order a printer with a PC, the printer would cost, say, 25 euros. When you proceeded to remove the PC from your shopping cart, the printer would still have the reduced price. Same outcome.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Just because some stinges can't accept that this is the real world, doesn't mean Dell is super evil...
Me and a friend called BS on his story, and he was quite insistent that it was real. We were just on our way from one bar to another at the time (a little inebriated perhaps) so we went into a Hungry Jacks store to test his theory. He ordered a Whopper as a "Two for One", and sure enough they gave it to him!
Mind you by the time he got to the front of the queue he had 16 drunk football (australian rules) players chanting "Two for one" so perhaps they just gave it to him to make us leave....
But if it was *genuine* makes you think that maybe us australians are pretty serious about keeping companies honest about their marketing.
-Steve http://www.stevennicholson.com
I scored $400 off my 30" dell when I ordered it through Dell's website from Australia. They honored the agreement when I bought it even though their website had screwed up and had doubled the $200 off offer to $400. I am a pleased customer and would shop at Dell again.
As per English Contract Law(which australia must be following), a publicly displayed advertisement for a product/service displaying a price for the same becomes a contract when it is accepted by anyone who pays for the same product/service to the advertiser.
In short, Dell has signed a contract with each one of the paying customers to provide the advertised product at advertised price.
If Dell fails to do so, it is in violation of the applicable contract law and as such the counter-party to the contract may sue Dell for violation and subsequent consequential damages.
The fact that Dell claims it is a mistake is not relevant and is not the customers' responsibility.
All a customer has to do is to swear in front of a magistrate or sign a letter thathe acted in "Good faith" that the advertisement was genuine.
Dell Customers Australia: If you have placed the order, do NOT back out and accept a refund. Write to Dell to fulfill its contract and threaten it with a lawsuit. Am sure 200 lawsuits in 200 courts is not a small matter for Dell.
The law is on your side for a change.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I think whether or not this is wrong depends entirely on whether or not money as changed hands at the time the error is noticed.
For instance, we would not consider a car dealership to be contractually bound to sell cars for $3000 a piece if a typo caused a zero to be left off the price in an advertisement. An advertisement or coupon simply does not constitute a contract.
In that same vein, I would argue that making an internet purchase is not a contract as well, or rather, at least not initially. Giving a company your credit information and clicking "Purchase" is not the same as handing another person cash and shaking hands, as that credit information must first be authorized and processed before money is actually transferred. Until that is done, the transaction (and hence, contract) has not been completed, and you the consumer aren't entitled to anything. Consequently, if an error is found at this stage, I see nothing wrong with a company cancelling the order in question.
If money is transferred, that is a whole different ball of wax. The deal is then done, and a business should be held to whatever price they stated. At that point they have taken your money, depriving you the use of it for anything else, and it is not acceptable for them to cancel the order simply because of their incompetence, anymore than they can call you up a month later and demand more money for an item you already purchased.
Once we advertised a service, we created the ad before we decided on the price. Long story short, it ended up being advertised as $0.00. Our lawyer informed that the advert was not binding. IANAL and YMMV ofcourse.
August 18, 2005.
And this is news?
Why on Earth must Australia be following English Contract Law? We've had our own set of statutes for quite some time now.
Too good to be recent, this story is from August, 2005. Nice one!
The advertised price is an invitation for a potential buyer to
make an offer for the goods. If the retailer accepts the offer,
then a contract has been executed.
There are sets of laws that address mistakes, fraud and/or
deception by either party leading up to the moment that the
contract is executed; these may result in the contract being
invalidated.
--remains
WTF?!?
Who thinks that an article that is over 3 years old is "News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters"?
Dell has been caught red-faced: 2005
... apologized ... : 2008
This goes as a warning for those interested in the old Latitude D-series notebooks. Great machines, and Dell says they're still being sold on their website. Well, I ordered one for a client about 3 weeks ago, and was just informed last week that they are being discontinued and the particular model I ordered will not be arriving. I love how you have to wait to the last minute to find out this information. More inventory control needs to be done on their part. As a premier partner, I have slowly and surely gotten more pissed at Dell as of late. I sell their computers because of their excellent NBD warranties with prosupport. but god damn this kind of simple shit has been pissing me off.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
One day, I was window shopping Dell's web site for a Mini 9 (Inspiron 910), setting up a tricked-out system. I saw that there was a $250 off coupon that was applied to that system. I immediately bought the system, stopping only to make sure that I put in all the features. I expected the order to be canceled because the coupon was for a Studio laptop and this was a Inspiron netbook. Well, the order got canceled, but because the Dell Preferred Account had issues. I called and placed the order again using my Amex over the phone, and the guy was perfectly content to sell me the system for less than half price. The system just shipped yesterday (on Sunday?!) and should be here by this Thursday.
Was this a mistake, or a "mistake"?
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Well in Germany we have the same law but it must be an obvious and honest mistake like a moved decimal point or reversed digits.
i.E. advertising a 55% off when you meant a 5.5% off. Or â150 you meant â1500 (that would be a 90% discount).
Mind you, with the current "SALE - SALE" Zeitgeist I don't think 55% off is unrealistic and I think in Germany and Switzerland Dell would have to bite the bullet here.
Martin
This has happened here in Chile twice during 2008. In both cases Dell backed out of all sales, to great outrage. The second time it happened, I thought it was rather fishy; now that I see the same thing going on in Australia, it is starting to look like a corporate "marketing" policy.
This has already been pointed out half an hour ago. FYI, the second link is 2008.
It's good to know that Slashdot is now only three years behind on stories.
Here in the uk, there is a certain website that is red hot on picking up what are obvious price mixups (moneysavingexpert.com). I once got a Dell 2400 for less than 30% of the real price. Also picked up a celeron for less than £100 all in to make a little profit. They usually honour the screwups, but the current climate must be biting hard for them to not honour it. They may well cave as the adverse publicity is worth more than a few machines at cost(ish).
Having said that, if you spend big, there is nothing dell won't give you. Just the other day Dell gave us a $50,000 blade setup for free, on the hope we would buy some more high spec blades of em (we are totally a HP shop server wise, but desktop is a different story)
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
I haven't bought one thing from Dell since they refused to honour several deal prices on their Canadian website.
Not only incompetence, but then they can't even be ethical or honest about it.
Why must big business so often be evil?
This happened in Brazil in the past. And the Dell's site is also a big mess, with wrong offerings (e.g. things they don't sell here but they are in the site), wrong pricing, etc.
In Brazil, buying a Dell equipment thriugh the internet does not work. The best way, and yet far from accetable, is buying through phone. But sales reps are really bad trained.
How hard is it to hire a couple of interns to go through every price online every day to see if they're reasonable? Logically you can't force a company to make a money losing deal, no matter how wrong they were, just like nobody can force you to sell your house for a dollar. But a multi-billion dollar company should know better.
The same thing happened a few months ago in Chile. Dell's site offered laptops that used to cost about $500 at no more than $120; many customers (hundreds) ordered them, and then Dell backed off on the offer, saying it was a mistake. A couple of weeks later, it happened again, and they again called it a mistake and offered their customers a measly 15% off of the original price. And two months later... it happened yet again. Three times in three months (this time with desktop computers). The problem for them is that by chilean law, they are obliged to sell the laptops at the publicized price; but Dell has many lawyers... Some custumers sued anyway, so we'll see what happens.
More info here:
http://www.yocomprenotebookdella77lukas.org
I think the Kodak case set the president in the UK.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2864461.stm
It all depends on how the confirmation email is worded and as stated before if the price is obviously a mistake or could be considered a legitimate special offer price.
In the Kodak case it was £329 camera on offer at £100 which Kodak had to stand by in the end.
But here in Japan, here's the deal, at least as online sales go.
Advertiser puts up product with discount, possibly making a typo where "9% off" turned into "99% off". According to contract law, there is no contract until the seller responds to the customer's purchase request with an affirmative response, which closes the deal. This is why Japanese retailers make sure that their autoresponders do NOT confirm a sales, they just said "we just received your order for XXXX. We will get back to you when final order calculations are confirmed."
This is, honestly, fair enough in my opinion. The day of the internet did bring about instant shopping gratification by being able to "buy now", but stupid typos have been around as long as the printing press and printed marketing material has been around. Maybe even longer! (Merchant signs come to mind.) In the printing industry in Japan, just every once in a while there is a terrible typo in the type setting, that isn't caught until the actual advertisement leaflet has been sent out in newspapers to over 100,000 subscribers. Things equivalent to a fancy diamond ring being sold at a cut-throat price of "100,000 yen" when it was suppose to be "1,000,000 yen". A stupid mistake, but these things seem to get through multiple proof reads from time to time.
Well, here's what they used to do. They didn't HAVE to sell the product at that price because there was no contractual obligation until someone actually visited the store, and the clerk actually sold it for that amount. But. Simply saying "sorry, typo!" was considered to be terribly rude of the merchant. In these sorts of cases, the item in question would usually be in limited supply, so the printing company that made the mistake would get all their employees to line up from the night before, in front of the store, and first thing when doors open they would all go out to purchase the product, only later to sell it back at the same price. Silly if you ask me, but this way they managed to "sell as advertised". Once in a while, maybe 1 person may get ahead of them. In that case it was tough luck, with 1 lucky, smiling customer.
Note that this was also a way to avoid being (unlikely) attacked by the authorities for being a false advertiser, which is an entirely different deal than contract law. But, in Japan, common sense seems to rule the law, more than the explicit wording of the law itself. (Note that this has occasional ill effects, and is not perfect in any way.)
I saw a great deal on a desktop on dells swedish site. When I asked about it they told me it was incorreclty priced, but the ad was up for about a week. Sounds like it's deliberate.
This happened to me on a $20,000 purchase from dell. They ended up sending me a free NAS and two free laptops. They also let me keep the advertised price of my purchase due to a significant delay processing the order (it was shipped then recalled). Not too shabby.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
I wish I had saved my chat log. I had an very frustrating chat with a Dell sales associate. The price shown online was $99 for a Mini9 (at this site). Too good to be true, I know, but there it was. The site wouldn't let me check out so I opened a chat window. The person helping me couldn't confirm or deny the price and promised to call or email soon. This is what I got:
we apologize for the misinformation we are currently having error on the website. but ill make sure to let someone call you if things clear up. just log backin online to check if its still the price but i will be callig you when this is already cleared.
No further attempts to contact me. Good to see a professional interface with the customer, huh?
I recently bought one of Sony's massive 18.4 inch laptops (the top of the line one with the Adobe RGB screen and the 2 x SSD's) for a substansially reduced price from their website. Got EUR1350 OFF the RRP of EUR3379, so still a pricey EUR2K.
Sony honoured the deal without a word, fair play to them. I guess two things were in my favour...
1) I didn't blab it everywhere resulting in a made rush ensuring everybody loses out (Game theory, thank you Mr. Nash)
2) At a price of EUR2K I would have been well within my rights to claim that I entered into a sales contract in good faith.
Nice laptop by the way...
Not sure about Oz, but in the UK the trading standards laws state that if a particular item is advertised (particularly if that item is pictured in said advertising) at a certain price, then it's the advertisers liability to honour the deal and supply that product at that price otherwise it's false advertising. You need documented proof of the offer (grabbing the webpage before it got changed would help) or keeping the magazine/newspaper ad. There is one way out of this for advertisers, and that's to print 'E&OE' (errors and omissions excepted) somewhere in the smallprint under the ad as a get-out clause. If this isn't displayed with the ad then there's nothing the advertiser can do to avoid their responsibilities if they make a stupid mistake.
Here in Chile we had the same problem, Twice!! after this problems they offer a 15% off on regular prices but buyers did nos accept this and now the case in the justice... make you wonder if this is not a strategy to get publicity?
At the very least complain to the FTC and Better Business Bureau. Even though this happened in Australia, Dell is a US based company and therefore it should work to report their shenanigans to US based authorities.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Dell desktops, on the other hand, I've never been disappointed by.
Try adding a standard consumer component to them. Add a floppy/optical driev? Pick one up from the store and ... *BZZT* nope. The mounting screws are inverted in such a manner that you need the specific Dell drive (at 3-4x the price) to fit your computer. Even if the holes were made (a few mins with a power drill), they still wouldn't fit through the damn Dell-specific front bezel half the time
You would think it was an error, but no, this is a method to create buzz and potentially sell other prducts. So if you ordered the deal with lets say, a gaming keyboard and mouse, each would be a separate order. You can cancel your original but you would still recieve the gaming kb/mouse.
--
On Porpoise is a different matter.
I have never seen an Acer laptop for sale anywhere (including Wal-Mart) that didn't look exactly the same as Acer laptops sold everywhere else.
Well, that's the thing. It looks the same. Can you tell whether they used solid state or electrolitic caps? 800mhz memory or 600mhz? A CPU fan that cost them $1.99 or $.99?
Long story short, my Acer laptop died after 18 months. The power connector broke, physically broke. Around the same time, the lid cracked at the hinge.
That's worse than my e-machine. ;) The plastic's cracked around the hinge, but that's merely cosmetic. Otherwise it's still solid. Had loads of problems with the HP machine that preceded it - actually ended up opening it to resolder the power connector.
The moral of the story is that Acer laptops are cheap pieces of shit.
I'll take your word on it. I guess 'You get what you pay for' applies here. Always got to be careful because companies WILL sell you at any price you're willing to pay, without any increase in quality as well.
BTW, those of you complaining about batteries that have half the life after a couple years - degredation of the battery is because of the chemistry. LiIon loses capacity over time & charging, not just primarily charging. Always try to get a freshly manufactured cell. Some newer chemistries experience this less; but hold less power initially. They're looking to put them into hybrid cars more than laptops. The whole 3 year average lifespan vs 5-10 years for a car.
I don't read AC A human right
Its a Silly Slashdot Story time...
Around here we praise Linux, disagree on Apple and bash Dell. Its the way things are. Don't let facts get in the way of a good bashing...
For what its worth, the first link in story refers to the original time this happened (I assume in '05) - while the current mistake is what the story is about and is referred to as "yet another pricing mistake".
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
My mom worked in retail during the 1930s and 40s, eventually rising to the position of buyer in Bloomingdale's. She said that retailers were not legally bound to honor misprints, but that the policy of Bloomingdale's (and its competitors) was to honor them, without question, because they would rather take a one-time loss on a single item than lose a customer.
This is not about the law, this is about decency and keeping promises and doing the right thing by customers.
I know that there is currently a management fad to try to identify "bad" (i.e. lower-profit) customers, and deliberately annoy them in hope of losing them. As the bad economic times start to bite in, I think they will find that treating customers as easily-replaced disposables is not a good idea.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
This leaves me wondering if Dell has gotten too large.
When companies get bigger, they tend to componentize themselves to make things easier to manage, but each component/department only thinks about itself. Dell will now probably spend $2,000,000 fixing this bad PR, when they could've just admitted their mistake and gotten good PR for it.
It may not be the law - actually, the law is probably in their favour in just about every country - but they could've still granted the reduced price.
This is why I support local eTailers like NCIX. (I'm from Canada) Recently they did a similar thing(C2D + Mobo combo for $60 rather than $160), and yet they honoured it, taking an $80 loss on every order. ;)
It seems that often the small companies haven't forgotten about the consumer/buyer, while the big ones have.
I imagine it's a bit merky in these situations but I know that in a physical shop in Australia if a product is marked cheaper than it should be then the shop has to charge the advertised price by law.
Pay up Dell you rotten pos.