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Dell fined $6.5M after admitting it made overpriced monitors look discounted
- yieldcrv 3y agoWait you can be fined for that? The state should make a bounty program, Prime Day and Black Friday are about to be the only times I work!
- dbetteridge 3y agoAustralia We have some very strong consumer laws especially around deceptive pricing and expectations of the life of appliances
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoI believe France has laws like this also (restrictions on what can be advertised as a "sale" at least).
- harry8 3y agoDell pushed a bios update that silently turned my expensive laptop into a machine that could not be used as a laptop because when I did, ie, closed the lid without shutting it down and put it in my bag it fried the mobo and subsequently would not boot. Out of warranty (just) no way to ask Dell anything about it. Dell are horrible. I hate them. The price has to be insanely cheap for Dell not to be just a plain old ripoff at the best of times. Actual lies, like detailed here should not surprise anyone.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- stemlord 3y agoThe amount of research that needs to be done to purchase even the most basic stuff online is beyond paralyzing. I hate shopping irl but I think I hate online shopping even more.
- bombcar 3y agoThis is how places like Costco can be worthwhile even if they aren't technically the best possible deal - I trust that if I buy something there I won't be terribly disappointed or overtly screwed over even if I end up paying a bit more than I absolutely had to.
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoCostco is the hero we need.
- robotnikman 3y agoThat's been my experience so far when getting electronics from costco. Seems like they do a decent job of curating decent stuff.
- bombcar 3y agoThey have a simple trick - they make the vendor eat any returns. So vendors won't ship them shit, because they know they'll eat the returns. I'm sure they do additional curation on top of that, but making them stand behind the product probably gets 80% of the way there.
- SoftTalker 3y agoI would never have imagined there was any other policy in retail, at least for big-ticket items like TVs and appliances. Why should the retailer ever eat the returns?
- bombcar 3y agoBecause Costco takes returns way past the manufacturer's warranty/return period. So if random brand X wants to keep selling those toilets at Costco, they will sometimes get a deduction from their invoice because a curmudgeon brought in a ten year old toilet that broke. (Costco had to change this policy on computers and TVs because word got out and people began abusing the policy so much the vendors revolted.)
- userbinator 3y agoI'm surprised this became a fine, since I thought that most people who've seen enough shady tricks like this have already been trained never to look at the "original" or "pre discount" prices, only the actual current price.
- m463 3y agohttp://thumbpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/funny-marketing-store-shoes-sale1.jpg http://thumbpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/funny-marke...
- jackvalentine 3y agoAustralian consumer law is a lot stronger than people even inside the country realise.
- justrealist 3y agoThis is actually worse because people could often buy the monitor standalone for the lower price. The bundled "discount" price was higher.
- varispeed 3y agoYou are assuming that people see through this, but they don't. Furthermore, from my observations, I can tell you they are people who _like_ these kind of tricks. They kid themselves they got such a massive discount, feel happy about it and sometimes even think "Oooh I got $1000 discount, maybe I can treat myself and buy something else with that "saved" money?" Their mental accounting tells them they suddenly have a windfall that they can spend frivolously on something.
- mkoryak 3y ago> A Dell spokesperson told Ars Technica today that Dell is also paying customers interest and "taking steps to improve our pricing processes to ensure this sort of error does not happen again." Sounds like my 9 year old "It was an accident!!"
- kstrauser 3y agoI won’t buy Dell gear again, at home or at work. I bought my kid a monitor for his gaming PC from Amazon. It was advertised as brand new. Dell shipped it in a brand new, undamaged, unopened box. Its HDMI port failed a couple of months later but with many months of warranty left. Then Dell denied a warranty claim because their inventory system had it listed as having been previously registered to someone else. I tried to escalate the claim but they refused it all the way to the top. Amazon was helpful: they let me swap for another brand and just pay the difference. In before “how do we believe you?” I wrote this all up in a blog post, under my real name, with backing details. If I’m lying, Dell can sue me for defamation. A Dell corporate sales person contacted me at work to talk about setting up a work account. It felt sooo good to send them a link to my blog post and explain that Dell was dead to me. I didn’t hear back.
- S201 3y ago> In before “how do we believe you?” A company trying to weasel out of its warranty obligations is hardly something I'd cast doubt on anymore (unfortunately).
- kstrauser 3y agoYou and me both, but someone’s always gotta be a contrarian.
- WalterBright 3y agoNordstrom was famous for refunding the money for things obviously not bought at the store, for example, tires, and clearly worn out shoes. (As told to me by a former sales clerk at Nordies.) But too many people tried to make a living out of scamming Nordstrom's patient indulgence of this, and they changed their policy. Warranty fraud is a major problem.
- bmicraft 3y agoFor consumables, sure. But a monitor should last 8 years minimum.
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- mianos 3y agoIn Australian, a local government competition body regularly pursues this sort of fake-ass pricing. They are a great laugh once they a fined, but it is not so funny before. Here is one that is as ridiculous as the Black-Friday fake deals. edit, here is the gist: In July 2020, the Court found that Kogan had misled consumers by advertising over a period of four days that they could use the code ‘TAXTIME’ to reduce prices by 10 per cent at checkout, when Kogan had increased the prices of 621 products immediately before the promotion. In most cases, the prices of these products had been increased by at least 10 per cent. Kogan then decreased those prices soon after the promotion ended, many back to their pre-promotion prices. https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/kogan-to-pay-350000-for-misleading-tax-time-promotion#:~:text=The%20Federal%20Court%20has%20ordered,breach%20of%20Australian%20Consumer%20Law https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/kogan-to-pay-350000-fo....
- etrautmann 3y agoI just assumed retailers do this constantly and buyer beware. Is this not standard behavior? MSRP is so often completely made up with frequent arbitrary sales. Curious what law this is breaking.
- AndrewDavis 3y agoIn Australia there are certain requirements on how long a product must be at a price before you can advertise it as discounted, and say things like "save 50%". This is to prevent this exact practice where a store either lies and slaps a discount sticker on it without any discount to mislead a consumer, or from them putting up the price for 24 hours and then discounting it. There is no exact length of time, the law says "reasonable". So it'd be up to a court to decide. You can learn more here https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/pricing/price-displays https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/pricing/price-displays
- ingenika 3y agoLenovo maybe next ?
- Prickle 3y agoI have a DELL laptop. Probably the worst purchase I made. The one saving grace is that SupportAssist actually works, and does make post-crash/post-windows-death recovery very simple and easy. But that's the thing. I can tell that they put effort into this OS recovery tool, explicitly because this Laptop is a disaster of a product. Temperatures? Burning. Fans? Locked down. Freezing? Constantly. Crashing? Commonly. Blue screens? Less common now, but used to be frequent. Just had to do another OS recovery yesterday. But hey, it breaks constantly like a Russian Lada, and can be "fixed" relatively quickly and easily.
- sowbug 3y agoSorry about your bad experience, but what does this story have to do with misleading monitor pricing?
- Prickle 3y agoDELL uses pricing based on some unknowable calculus based on competitor products. So they show their monitor as a "sale" relative to competitor XYZ's monitor. Reality is that the product is just cheaper and worse than the competitor. This computer was purchased based on one of these "sales". In terms of raw performance, it seemed like a decent deal. It was not. The issue isn't just their monitors, so I am a bit confused as to why this fine singles out monitors.
- hhh 3y agoDell very rarely builds things like this. They just buy them and slap their name on it.
- zeven7 3y agoI don't like Dell as a company, but I've owned XPS laptops for years and haven't been able to find something I like better. The only real problem I have with it seems to be a Windows problem that other laptops also have (modern standby). My other complaint was with Waves MaxxAudio, but it hasn't bothered me on my latest XPS the way it did on the older ones. Not sure if that problem is fixed or if I just got in some sort of lucky configuration that made it go away.
- Beldin 3y agoJust to point out: this amounts to a little over $1200 (US) per sold monitor. And Dell was ordered to provide affected customers full or partial reimbursement on top of this. So definitely a costly affair.
- Lamad123 3y agoTech companies have completely zombified the customers and are winning and chain scamming the customer every step of the way!!
- de_nied 3y agoAnother Dell tomfoolery: their laptops advertised with 100w usb-c charging actually does only 60w charging, unless you buy Dell's superduper usb-c charger. Regardless if you have usb p.d 3.0 or higher.
- tsujp 3y agoFines should be at least 100% of _revenue_ from these activities to actually punish the business. At the very least 100% of _profit_ from the activity. Anything less is cost of doing business since it's by definition a net profit.
- m0llusk 3y agoBack in 1995 people told me that Dell should buy Apple and shut it down.