So, my spouse’s hobby is shopping, and does this primarily online. A couple of days ago they were looking around at some items on a high-end gift website, looking for after-Christmas sales, and stumbled upon an item with the posted price of $0.00. This item normally goes for $185.00 on the manufactures website. Huh, I wonder…click click click. Shipping cost ~$5. Total cost ~$5. OK, let’s get two!
Item charged to credit card ~$5. Package received today with the two items. High-end gift website is back to $185.00.
SCORE!
I suspect that if we had been more aggressive and tried to buy 100 of them to sell on eBay we would have ran into some push back, but one never knows!
Anybody else ever experience this fortunate anomaly?
Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work. I tried to book a last minute cruise that showed a really great price on line. So I called, and the agent I spoke to was having trouble finding the correct code for that fare. He and his supervisor dug thru everything with no luck - the actual price was more and half-again the posted price.
No, I didn’t raise a stink. People make mistakes. I’d looked at several sites for the same cruise, and all the other prices were higher. No big deal. I’ve dealt with this agency before and they were quite professional, and I hope to deal with them in the future. I’d rather know that I’ll be treated well instead of risking a note in my account about demanding the erroneous price.
Not to hate on the OP, but how would you feel if you made a mistake at work that cost the business a couple of hundred dollars? What if that came out of your paycheck? Wouldn’t you be grateful if someone alerted you to the mistake so it could be corrected before it cost money?
OK, maybe the seller of this item is a huge, faceless corporation who won’t even notice the difference, but it’s the same principle in any case. As others have indicated, I’m rather surprised the order was honoured when it’s such an obvious error, but I don’t know what the consumer laws on this are (except that obviously they can differ greatly by jurisdiction). I suspect the organisation in question just decided to eat the loss on this occasion as a gesture of goodwill, but it will have annoyed somebody. Or it should have, if they care about the business.
Watch out if you ever see this on a retail site you don’t really know. Sometimes, the amazingly low price is just because it’s a scam and they intend to either take your money and run, or send you some crappy small cheap item just so they have proof of delivery to show to your payment provider.
If a business is on such thin ice that something like this leads it to steal from its employees’ paychecks to keep the lights on, that’s a good sign that it was already on the brink of bankruptcy.
I was more getting at the fact it could be a small, or even one-person, business, so any such errors are coming directly out of that person’s paycheck. Granted, this is unlikely for several reasons, but it’s the same general principle. I’ve made one or two mistakes in my career that cost my company an amount of money that was small to them but big to me, and although I didn’t face any consequences personally (it’s a cost of doing business), I still hated it and tried to ensure it never happened again.
I’m not too sure where you live or work, Dead Cat, but deducting from an employees paycheck the monetary cost of mistakes made by the employee is illegal as all hell here in Texas, which… given its employer-friendly nature… means it’s probably just as illegal across the country.
This seems to happen every year on Amazon on Black Friday. I don’t know if it’s just due to there me such a massive amount of price changes that there’s bound to be a few that screw up or if it’s due to so many people that don’t interact with Amazon’s back end enough that their not entirely familiar with it. Probably some combination of the two.
It seems like once the mistake makes it to reddit (or national news outlets) it gets fixed pretty quickly. It seems like there’s a lot a common mistake is for things to end up at 90% off, which I assume is someone attempting to make them 10% off. Every year, once the problem is well known enough that people outside that community are aware of it, if you check the right forums, you can usually find a handful of people that got, for example $15,000 camera equipment for $1500.
It’s illegal in Wisconsin as well. Dead Cat’s location is UK, but I imagine it’s similar. I know our labor laws make it very, very clear that an employee is to receive all their earned income. I’ve mentioned to the owner of my store a few times (just as part of a bigger discussion), that we could watch an employee take $500 out of a cash register, put it in her purse and say “I’m stealing this money”, all on camera, even leave a signed confession, and we’d still have to hand her her paycheck, for the full amount, on the next payday.
Granted, recovering the money, at least getting a judgement against her, shouldn’t be too difficult.
It does make some amount of sense, but it’s annoying when someone quits/gets fired while they owe you money.
TLDR; if they want to recover their money from that employee, they’d have to sue them.
It should be noted that this is what the law says. Plenty of employers don’t know the law and plenty of employees don’t know the law. If you work for a small business and leave owing them money, it’ll probably come out of your final paycheck.
I saw an unusually low price for something last summer, I think it was. So I clicked and ordered it. One of those Amazon storefront deals. Nothing for a couple days and then got a message that the item was no longer available or some such and my order was canceled.
I remember some kind of weirdness on the JC Penney site many years ago, like when they first tried out their “nothing is on sale, everything is cheap” thing. I don’t remember how it worked but I got a very good deal on a Cleveland Indians indoor/outdoor rug, and I think also an Indians garden gnome.
It might have been like an $85 coupon if you spent $100? Something like that.
I only remember that this happened because I still have both items and they are unusual for me to have spent money on, so every time I see them I think “Oh, I only have this because Penney’s screwed up.”
Well, yes, but like Dead Cat said, it could be a one-person business. Let’s say I have an online store, and I’m selling widgets for $200 each. The widgets cost me $100 each. I make a mistake, list the price on the website as $0.00 and someone comes along and buys 2. I either don’t notice the mistake until after I’ve shipped them, or I eat the cost for goodwill or customer service*. That $200 is coming out of my pocket.
It’s not coming out of "big company that won’t even notice $200"s pocket
Although in reality, I probably wouldn’t - someone who complains that I didn’t honor an obvious mistake is not a customer I need. And yes, there are people who do that - I read about a guy who saw a cruise fare of about $2K per couple for a 10 day cruise on a luxury line on a Friday. He booked 2 rooms on 2 different websites for that price (He obviously was afraid that booking both on the same site would draw attention). Monday or Tuesday , he got a call. The price was obviously a mistake and they would not honor it. They gave him the option to cancel altogether, accept a lower room category (which would normally cost 6K) for the 2K, or pay the correct price - which was $17K per room. Rather than accept any of those options, he tried to enlist a consumer advocate to get him the $17K cruises for $2K. Didn’t work.
Depends on the employee. I’ve worked multiple jobs were someone makes an error but it’s not a big deal and the employee’s overall value exceeds the cost of the error. People get fired when they make costly errors on a recurring basis or manage to make some huge mistake – in which cases the employee probably wasn’t a great fit for the job and shouldn’t be relying on 3rd parties to bail them out by pretending the errors don’t exist.
Best I’ve managed to get was a return coach trip for -5p.
I assume their website was having some issues, as a friend also found a ticket for the same price on the same site. They honoured mine, but my friend’s was cancelled a few days later- presumably because mine was a return and the outward trip was normal fare, theirs was a single at -5p…