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."

Comments

My experience

[Circlotron]

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.

Re:Too good to be true?

[JWSmythe]

I would normally say "it's an Acer", but if you do a little research, you'll find something interesting about WalMart products. Virtually every product in WalMart, is made specifically for WalMart. They are made slightly cheaper so WalMart can lower the final cost and always undercut their competition.

    I found this out with Sony HandCams. One place I worked had about a dozen of them for live web broadcasting (make assumptions, you're probably right). Two broke, so we went to a Sony authorized repair shop. He looked at them, or more specifically at the model, and heard our complaint. He then told us "I can't fix that". He wasn't trying to be difficult, so he explained that this model was a WalMart model. The broken component was something that breaks very quickly. He can't get replacements for it. If it had been another model from another retail outlet, he would have been more than happy to fix it, but it probably wouldn't have broken anyways.

    We had saved $50/ea on them. If I recall correctly even though they were simply sitting on tripods, attached by RCA cable to digitizers, 90% of them had some sort of failure within a year. I took one of the few surviving ones, just because we retired all of them. I left it charging on my desk, and one day it just started opening the tape door on it's own. I could close it, and sometime in the next few days it would just open it like someone hit the eject button.

    If you want something that will survive, don't buy it at WalMart, even if it looks just like the item being sold somewhere else, and only has a very subtle variation on the model number. WalMart makes their money selling crap at a price lower than the other stores can sell their slightly better crap. They know when it breaks, you will probably go back to WalMart and buy another one, blaming the manufacturer, not WalMart business practices.

    Read this story about Snapper discontinuing business with WalMart

    or this Business Week piece on lower quality Walmart products