Re: A bit missing from this article that sheds a different light..
"If you've ever tried to buy an open box, you'll need to demand a discount, because open boxes always, always, always have something missing."
I work in in-store customer services for DSG and I would have to say that taking that attitude is one of the reasons companies like DSG have to refuse to refund opened items and have a very hard time selling them. I know from experience that consumers are just not interested in buying an opened item because they assume there is something wrong with it. I have had to explain many times that this is not necessarily so. The customer may be a buying a laptop where the customer has been given the wrong colour for example, opened it, taken one look and brought it back untouched. No fault, no missing bits, but the next customer offered the item will demand discount and be much more likely to not buy it at all. I once had a colleague in another store try to disuade me from buying a router than had been opened in favour of a sealed one because of this perception - I pointed out that I knew what it likely meant and took the opened one anyway, it is still working perfectly, if it hadn't I would have had 28 days to get a refund or exchange or the facility to make a warranty claim after then the same as on an unopened item. On the flip side I once had a customer open a brand new, sealed laptop only to find a laptop with no charger and half a bag of Malteasers in the box: a seal isn't everything.
As to opening the box in the store, certainly all the managers and customer service people I have worked with have no problem with a customer opening a purchased item in the store. For myself, I have been asked by customers if they can open an item they have just bought in store, my answer is always 'You paid for it, it's yours, open away'. I would also be interested to know if there was a display machine available this guy could have checked over in the store. I have only worked for the company a few years so this is before my time, but these days it is very very rare we won't have a computer we sell out on display for customers to inspect.
As to the credit agreement itself that is actually at the heart of this story, credit law can be a complicated thing but I don't personally see how it could have reasonably taken this long to resolve, the latter part of the case seems to revolved around the outcome of the case in terms of damages, costs and the like rather than the actual credit agreement and sale itself. I have had to refund credit agreements from time to time and it is now a simple task of refunding the deposit and letting the credit provider know the details of the cancelled agreement and it is done. I can only imagine something went wrong in that process and once the initial cooling off period has expired the courts would be the only way to resolve the dispute. Again, I am too new to the company to know what processes would have been in place back then but I don't see it being something likely to happen now, and hopefully it was the exception rather the rule back when he bought his laptop too.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
