What's the Right Thing?
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No Stephanie. Believe it or not, there are actually people in the world that WANT to do the right thing.
Take care,
Bert
"Speculations? I know nothing about speculations. I'm resting on certainties. I know that my Redeemer lives, and because He lives, I shall live also." - Michael Faraday
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While it might be morally wrong not to return the item, it is morally and ethically wrong for amazone to make custumers pay for their mistake/ slipup
To even consider using this as a test case of a later day scam is distubing. There has to be buyers protection law against this. They made the mistake, they should have the privilledge of learning from it.
Ola
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That may be the law. But what is legal and what is moral is not always the same thing. As a consumer, I would love to live under that law, but it seems that the customers in the Amazon case are clearly abusing the law, if the law in fact applies to Amazon.com. I am no friend of siding with companies, given the temptation for them to play tricks with money, but I just don't see how letting customers get away with paying nothing fulfills the spirit (or even the letter) of the law. If a company stated "buy one get one free" with a price listed and then the payment page says 0.00, the customer is wilfully defrauding the company. The term "buy" is never used for anything that is free.
But as I said, I am a layman regarding the law, so the above is just my personal opinion.
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A SQL query walks into a bar and sees two tables. He walks up to them and asks, "Can I join you?"
Ref.: http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2009/02/sql-joke.html -
It was Amazon's mistake and they had to pay for their mistake. It is not right to charge customer's credit card without authorization. The customer could tell the credit card not to pay for it.
Such a big company, they should learn to be grateful for their customers. In this case they would lose their customer.
Anyway, a few years ago I pre-ordered a Harry Potter book from them and they said they would ship to me by Federal Express on the date it came out. I got the book - not one but two. Someone made a mistake to ship me two books. I did not report it because it was not my fault they ship an extra book to me !!!!!
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Bill, I think you're wrong. The terms and conditions of sale are totally different to your idea of "agreement". The T's and C's on a sale carry through to completion, you can't pick and choose when they apply.
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Interesting. What is the legal basis for siding with the customer in that case? If a customer makes a mistake and, say, could somehow pay Amazon $20.00 for a book listed at $10.00, why does the company have to pay the difference back to the person? Or, as was stated above, the company must pay the difference if another price was simply listed elsewhere.
What about transactions between two people?
Just curious.
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A SQL query walks into a bar and sees two tables. He walks up to them and asks, "Can I join you?"
Ref.: http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2009/02/sql-joke.html -
Thanks for the responses and I'm hope I'm not implying anyone that didn't pay is not a moral person.
It's a tough question. There is a legal and moral side to this and I'm not sure if they are different or not. Terms of sale are interesting. We could, and probably have, all been over and undercharged at times. If it were my friend's store, I'd want to be sure I corrected things because I wouldn't want them to suffer an honest mistake.
If this is an honest mistake by Amazon, I think I should just pay for the DVD. If it was a marketing test to see if they could do it, I'm not sure I could. If it's a legitimate mistake, they bring my attention to it and let it go, they get "paid" in goodwill from me. I would certainly feel more loyalty towards them.
It's a weird gray area and I honestly am not sure what the thing to do is. But I appreciate the debate. I've definitely learned some things and gotten some nice viewpoints.
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My Blog: www.voiceofthedba.com -
Big company or not, if the only customers one would lose are ones who will take advantage and be less than honest about paying for what they received, I would say that the company is much better off! And.... their bottom line would certainly be better.
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Sorry folks, but pay up. Clearly, the offer was 'buy one get one free' not 'get everything for free'. You owe the money.
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Amazon's solution is simple.
Charge the buyers full price for both DVD's and then offer a 50% discount on the DVD that cost less as a token thank you for bringing the error to their attention when the customer complains. Or give them the option to return the unopened DVD for a full credit.
Actually, I think Amazon's mistake is their mistake. Move on. I doubt if millions of dollars are at stake. They should have safeguards on their checkout process or certainly red flags when they start seeing $0.00 invoices going out. Who was a sleep at that switch?
Amazon knows who took advantage of them and they are entitled to refuse their next order. That will have the same effect as back charging them now. Either way, that customer probably won't purchase there again. I know I don't go back if I get burned by a retailer whether they be online or brick and stone. In fact, I am having this discussion with TigerDirect right now over a problem and I am about to drop them as a source.
So how do you tell an online company that you want to pay what you owe and not zero? And if you bring that to their attention, should they offer free shipping or something for doing so?
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Actually the problem comes from application layer transaction being none atomic and RDBMS transaction being a unit of work and atomic so whatever was used as the bridge of both transaction layers made the mistake, I always tell developers you could run into pesky problems.
A developer once old me the .NET docs said he can do it, I replied I don't care what the docs said it is invalid. The thread Steve posted have two answers some paid others ignored the email which is paying but it will take Amazon longer to get the money.
Kind regards,
Gift Peddie -
The problem was they did not test their system thoroughly. What a lousy implementation!!!
Whose fault is it ? The management did not plan it right, or the developers did a very lousy job designing and testing the system !!!
One time when I worked at the bank, we implemented a new loan system but it did not work too well. A friend of the CEO tried to apply a loan and kicked him out. The CEO was furious. Then it came down to the IT VP, director, manager and the developers to fix the system. I remembered the other managers were all smiling. The manager who was responsible for that system decided to step down to become a developer later on. He could not handle the stress anymore.
From a developer point of view, I actually felt bad for the Amazon deveopers and manager who did that implementation!!!!! They probably had a hard time to explain to the management.
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I agree completely. I don't know of any other problems people have had with Amazon, but generally I've been satisifed with their service. I would not have expected them to trip on something like this. Granted, it is easy to do Monday-morning quarterbacking, but still. My guess is that there must be things for which Amazon does allow a 0.00 checkout (even excluding gift certificate credits?) and somehow the logic got messed up.
What I am hearing in this thread are a few things:
1. The system problem is Amazon's fault. I don't think there's any question about that.
2. Laws may prevent Amazon from reclaiming the money, or there may be a legal fight about it.
3. Some people feel they would repay Amazon for the money (or that Amazon has a right to get it back), others think they don't, that Amazon fell asleep and it is the cost of doing business.
I think part of the issue is the method of the transaction and the scale. Even those who think that they are entitled to keep an extra item if it is shipped to them by mistake probably would not want to test the waters if, say, two cars were shipped to them by mistake. I bet the company would win that one. On the other hand, because companies have defrauded customers to badly in the past, I can't really blame laws that give customers the benefit of the doubt.
And even with smaller items, one is not morally obligated to keep the extra items; it's just a question of lucking out and keeping the extra, like the "Bank error in your favor" from Monopoly.
As I said before, though, I think that aside from the legal issues, to me it is a matter of what I would do. I personally would not necessarily judge what someone else did. After all, if we know a person we can tell whether they are a good person overall and put things like this in context. With some people, you would know it is yet more evidence that they are shady across the board; with others, you know that they either made an honest mistake or otherwise were taking what the company's mistake offered them. I think you really have to know a person to tell which is which. None of us is a perfect moral agent; such a thing is impossible.
Perhaps the biggest moral is TEST TEST TEST!
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A SQL query walks into a bar and sees two tables. He walks up to them and asks, "Can I join you?"
Ref.: http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2009/02/sql-joke.html -
You have to know both layers to recognize that problem when I first explained it, the developer was annoyed but admitted after my explanation he saw his error but insisted the .NET docs says he could do it to which I replied it is invalid.
Transaction can be quantified to implement a system for site like Amazon they need both layers, you are right testing would have exposed it but a data expert could have caught it in code review.
Kind regards,
Gift Peddie -
It's Amazon's mistake and It should not renege. This is why:
Who's to say the error wasn't in the promotion, rather than the charge? Amazon is simply choosing the side of the error in their favor.
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