Slashdot Mirror
Customers Creating Fake Amazon Pages To Get Cheap Electronics At Walmart
turkeydance writes People are reportedly creating fake Amazon pages to show fake prices on electronics and other items. In the most heavily publicized cases, Walmart was reportedly duped into selling $400 PlayStation 4 consoles for under $100. From the article: "The company announced on Nov. 13 that it would price-match select online retailers, including Amazon.com. However, any Amazon member with a registered selling account can create authentic looking pages and list items 'for sale' online. Consumers need only take a screen capture of the page and show it to a cashier at checkout in order to request the price match."
good luck. i'm doing jury duty on a civil case in NYC now and the system will break you before you see any money
It is fraud if you create a web page purely to deceive Walmart into giving you a discount on a product you had no intention of selling for the price.
It is deeply dishonest, and there is no other excuse for that behaviour.
Alternately, these might be Wal-Mart employees who've figured out how earn more than $15/hr by taking a cut of the fake savings, without appearing overtly guilty. At least, you for one are eager to assume they're too dumb to be guilty, which is probably true of their bosses also.
After all, when your employer pays you terribly, why do you care? Reject the idea, customer complains to your manager. Who is also, may not be the brightest star in the constellation, who may discipline/fire you.
Also? Average wage at WalMart: $8/hr (weekly: 8*8=64 * 5 days=$320). Which means, pulling this once and reselling the console is almost a week's pay. Taking $300 from WalMart, whose family owns more money than the bottom 42% of the US combined to feed your family doesn't seem like the most heartless crime in the world.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Because the objective of price matching policies is to convert a competitors sale to your sale
No, it's not. The purpose of Wal-Mart's price matching policy is to drive competition out of business. It's like running a loss-leader sale, where you sell below cost until the competition goes out of business and then hike prices to make up for it later. Mega-Corps like Wal-Mart have deep enough pockets to do this, but it can get them in trouble with regulations covering Monopolistic and Anti-Competitive practices. The "price matching" program is a loophole which allows them to do almost the same thing.
Personally I would suspect that Wal-Mart probably didn't really care, or may have even anticipated such things and intentionally allowed it to happen. It's free advertising, and now the Word is Out that you can get stuff on the cheap from Wal-Mart by "tricking" them. Just in time for the holiday season? The timing is rather suspicious. Sure, they might sell at a loss, but they can easily afford to do it and watch the competition post slow and dismal Holiday sales. Many retailers live or die by the results of this shopping season.
Or put in a more simple fashion- don't be so quick to call these people "crooks", when at the very worst they're taking advantage of a much larger, more pervasive Crook.
Walmart was not obliged to sell other than by it's own actions... They could have challenged it or otherwise...
It's actions were made on the intent of beating it's competitors and this backfired... Only consumers really need to be protected from their own stupidity and ignorance - Corporations are big enough to make their own miscalculations and live with the consequences.
caveat venditor would be more appropriate -
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
It really doesn't, and you don't understand Laissez faire.
No, I understand how it works in reality just fine. You can give me all the bullshit definitions you want, but when put in practice it very much does mean that.
Next you'll tell us that rape and murder are legal under that system.
Since it's an economic policy not a social one, no I wouldn't.