So I just saw an episode of a TV show (not mentioning the name to avoid spoilers) wherein our heroine and her boyfriend and their 5-year-old-ish son are at a flea market. The two adults get distracted for a moment, and while they’re distracted, their son smashes an item for sale. The vendor says “you broke it you bought it”. They say “how much”. He says “four thousand dollars”, which they agree to pay, which is a huge financial hardship for them, seriously interfering with their life plans.
This struck me as entirely implausible, on several fronts:
(1) If you’re selling a $4K antique item of some sort (maybe it was a clock? not sure) at a flea market, you don’t leave it sitting out unattended near the front of your goods where a little kid can pick it up and smash it
(2) While the general principle of “you broke it you bought it” is ethically sound, there’s certainly a limit, at least in an environment like a flea market. It would be ridiculous for someone’s life to be ruined because they went to a flea market with a kid, the kid smashed something, and the something was worth millions of dollars, and now they are just infinitely in debt for the rest of their lives
(Let’s ignore for the moment the issue of verification and assume that the item was in fact worth $4K, and that any discussion of validating that claim was left out of the TV show for brevity.)
So I’m curious if (a) anyone knows the legalities of this. Could the vendor press successfully press a claim in court if the couple refused to pay, and (b) if people have any thoughts on the ethics of the situation. I gotta say, I think they’re murky.
Since someone handled or bumped into something, which is an unnecessary or unrequired action, I would think that in a plausible situation, it would stand. If your child runs her Big Wheel through my yard and snaps off the irrigation heads, you’re liable. For that matter, if she shoplifts a bracelet, whether plastic or diamond, you’re liable, too. IANAL, but I see the person who broke something as having responsibility for the damage ans loss of value.
I’ll avoid the legal aspects because I don’t know much about them.
Ethically I think that if you break something in a reasonable accident you’re responsible for making the “victim” whole. That doesn’t necessarily mean paying their list price for the item. It’s probably closer to whatever their cost of acquisition was. I suppose you could argue that it ought to include compensation for lost opportunity or the work required to acquire the item again, but I think that over complicates things in the case of good faith accidents.
I’ve intentionally fudged a bit with “reasonable” and “good faith”. I could imagine cases where the items are hazardously balanced or other negligence on the part of the store owner where I’d probably assign most of the blame to them. In those cases, I’d be more inclined to let them eat the cost as the price of doing business in an incompetent manner.
I don’t think demanding list price is ethically sound. If you want to go that route and pretend it’s a regular sale then you’ve got to allow the usual haggling, and good luck with that since you effectively don’t have a choice but to sell it at whatever price is agreed with a person who doesn’t really want it.
And how does the customer know the seller didn’t immediately jack up prices after the damage was done? Maybe it was worth only $600 but the seller sees an “opportunity.”
Things are worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. The price that the seller wants to sell it at is just their aspirations.
It did end up being worth that, because the people paid that much for it.
I don’t know if that is enforceable legally. If they had simply refused to pay it, I don’t know what he could have done other than yell at them some more.
Breaking something would not create a contract, it would create a tort. You’d be liable for the fair market value (or something close to that idea) of the item which would be unlikely to be 4000 dollars.
Right, but there’s at least an argument that having a $4K fragile object sitting unsupervised at a flea market is, by its very nature, hazardous and unreasonable… although obviously one could take that argument too far. But imagine this: you’re in a used bookstore, and you’re talking on your cell phone, and you accidentally step backwards onto a short pile of books and leave a big ugly footprint on a dusk jacket. OK, you’re clearly 100% at fault. But what if it turns out that that book was a first edition of Ulysses and is worth $15K, in a bookstore where most inventory costs $2 or less, and there was absolutely no marking, no warning, no “this is the super-expensive section, be extra careful”? If something like that happened to me I’d definitely feel like I was getting screwed, while acknowledging that the fault in the situation was 100% mine.
I go to a lot of flea markets and antique shows and had this happen to me. I just bumped a table and a glass item fell off and broke. The dealer did not even have a price tag on it. We settled for $20 which I thought was way over what a nondescript bowl was worth, but oh well.
I witnessed one real disaster at a high end Depression Glass show. This show was very popular and heavily attended. Everyone went there to get excellent pieces. Shows like this are spectacular to view. Tables are almost end to end and each table has another tier or two across the back loaded with glassware. Strong overhead spots makes the whole show glitter like diamonds. I watched as one guy picked up a piece of glass from an upper shelf, which somehow caused the entire two tiers to collapse, which then took out the glass on the table itself, and even caused some pieces to break on adjoining dealer’s tables. Dozens of expensive pieces.
It made a horrific crash and brought the hubbub of the show to a complete silence. The poor guy was standing there with that one piece in his hand. The dealer was obviously ruined.
A reasonably prudent person wouldn’t bring an expensive item to a flea market, the chance of theft/loss is way too high. You might bring a few low-end pieces and advertise your expensive items for a future not-at-the-flea-market meeting, if any one asks.
If a shop owner leaves a pile of books somewhere a person could trip over it, he better hope you don’t fracture your skull. Plus, “Ulysses,” would be upstairs in the safe, waiting for a serious speculator/collector.
When I worked at a grocery store back in the 80s, stuff like that would happen fairly frequently. I don’t think the store ever would have considered making somebody pay for an accident like that. My biggest concern as a clerk was what do I do first? Get a replacement or clean up the mess. Of course, that’s a $3 jar of salsa, not something worth thousands.
Incidents like that did make me question the store’s numbers on shoplifting, because broken items weren’t recorded in any way.
Former c-store inventory crew member here–shoplifting, breakage and stuff going bad (think frozen food left behind the dog food cans) is lumped together as “shrinkage.” It gets reconciled when the store goes through inventory and it all counts against the inventory totals. In the case of breakage and the like, some store managers would hang onto enough of the packaging such that they could have it written off as breakage by the inventory people, which didn’t affect the bottom line at all but it did get counted slightly differently in that breakage didn’t count against the manager’s monthly bonus as much as straight up loss did. Couple places we counted had some nasty disaster piles, like a big tote full of crap stashed in the freezer waiting for a good inventory for the manager to write off–if it showed up for a few months in a row we’d count it, put a total on the outside of the tote and seal it so we didn’t have to count every single item inside, which can suck a lot when you’re counting a freezer. You want freezers to be done ASAP, it’s hard on the hands to be in there.
But that isn’t the definition of fair market value. While we can always find people who might buy something in distress, are selling something due to fraud, or various other scenarios, those aren’t reflections of fair market value.
FMV is generally defined as the price as which a buyer and seller, who are not being compelled to engage in the transaction, and are generally knowledgeable aboutthe nature of the transaction, would agree upon.
So if the seller was trying to cash in on the couple’s guilt about their kid ruining something, and they agree to pay a lot for the item, the transaction isn’t fraudulent, but probably doesn’t reflect fair market value of the thing.
The general rule is that the person who broke it owes the seller the fair market value of the item if it was broken due to the person’s negligence. But, if the seller was also negligent in some way, that will offset the liability. Different states would handle the seller’s negligence differently. Some would say if the seller’s negligence contributed to the accident at all, the seller can’t collect anything (contributory negligence regime). Some states would say that you compare who was more negligent (comparative negligence regime). In most comparative negligence regimes, if the seller was more than 50% negligent, he couldn’t collect anything. If he was less than 50% negligent, he could collect the percentage of the fair market value equal to the customer’s negligence.
Negligence requires doing something unreasonable. In my view, there is nothing unreasonable about bringing a four year to a flea market. Even children who are reasonably supervised by their parents might break something sometimes. This falls into the legal maxim of “shit happens.” It doesn’t necessarily mean that the parents were negligent.
The seller must also act reasonably. Putting piles of fragile stuff on the edge of a table adjacent to a busy aisle, relying on rickety tables or shelves to hold fragile items, putting fragile items on the floor, leaving fragile items in hard to reach pl aces, or failing to further secure particularly valuable items could all be viewed as the seller’s negligence.
Exactly. This is why we have courts. If two people cannot agree what the amount damage cause should be, there is a process for deciding. If there’s a dispute as to relative blame for the accident (poorly positioned, insufficient support, etc.) then the judge can decide about that aspect of relative damages too. If it’s a trivial amount, there’s the less formal small claims court. (and note that if someone is insured, this is the same process the insurance company may use to determine the payout.)
But nobody is on the hook for whatever the seller says is the price. Just what is “fair market value”. Of course, the fun part is determining FMV.
If someone picks up an object and the entire booth disintegrates, then I don’t think a judge will consider the damage to be the fault of the customer. Reasonable precautions are expected. (Hmmm… “reasonable” again.)
There’s also the debate about how liable someone is for what their children do.
Supermarkets typically don’t make people pay for occasional breakage because usually, the amount of the broken item is trivial compared to what the customer may spend this visit and over and over again on future visits. It’s a cost of selling items in fragile containers, and not alienating customers. Deliberate or massive damage (drove car through the storefront) may be treated differently.
I agree that ethically and legally you should pay fair market value for it.
My response to a claim of $4000 would be to grab any witnesses nearby and get their contact info, then give my name and telephone number to the vendor and tell him he can sue me.
I feel like this, while an interesting discussion, is not the one that I actually intended. Let’s take it as a given that the object really does have a fair market value of $4K, indisputably.
Would you still consider yourself ethically and legally responsible to pay the vendor the full $4K?
My contention is that the environment of a flea market is such that if a kid, a few seconds of unsupervised kidness, broke something worth $4K, then by definition the seller was largely negligent in how the item was stored/displayed/secured. The equivalent of a supermarket having a $1000 bottle of champagne sitting precariously on the edge of a very tippy shelf, or something like that.