No way. Not a chance in hell. I would be offended by the request. He may have misquoted the furniture but once he took payment at that price, he fucked up an order. If he’s being honest, which is highly suspect. Either way, that’s between him and his boss.
“I’m sorry that you made an error on your offer but my decision to purchase was based on that offer. Our transaction is complete.”
This is so completely unprofessional that I would contact the general manager or president/owner of the company to express my concern. If it’s a chain retailer, I would call their corporate office and be loud about it. Have you checked online reviews from Yelp or other sources to see if anyone else has had a similar experience? Depending on your conversation with someone in management (not the sales manager) it might be nice of you to post your experience as a warning to others.
For what it’s worth, I’ve been in sales for many years. I have fucked up quotes and I have fucked up orders. I don’t think I’ve ever booked a negative margin order (except on purpose for demo, sample, courtesy, etc.) but I have suffered a few embarrassing ones. I have absolutely, never once, taken payment for an order that I had to renege on. I’ve reneged on quotes for my own error or supplier error very, very rarely but never on a confirmed order.
Asking for additional payment after a closed order is delivered is mind boggling. It’s simply not acceptable. I would not do so under any circumstances other than clerical error in invoicing or payment. If my employer demanded that I do so for any reason, I would pay the difference out of pocket or quit and that is not an exaggeration.
Do not pay anything else to this company. There is an adjective that describes their request. Egregious. You shouldn’t be considering whether or not to pay. You should be considering if you should be annoyed or furious. Aim for somewhere in between. Good luck.
Thank you everyone for confirming my course of action. This is the 2nd time I’ve bought furniture at this store and this email is the only negative. I believe it was an honest mistake but I’m still not going to pay it. If they had contacted me within, say, a week of the sale as they were going over recent receipts I might have considered paying. But after I’ve paid and the merchandise has been delivered there’s no way they can reasonably try to change the price. I am rather annoyed about the email. I think he should just own his mistake.
Another thing: it may depend on the store (here in the DC area this would be true for Marlo, say, but probably not Ikea), but when you get into furniture sets into 4 figures, my experience has been that the salespeople seem to have a certain amount of negotiating room, and will offer you a price a couple hundred dollars below the sticker price on a set in order to keep you from walking away.
If I’d made a deal at such a store and they came back to me later with that sort of line, I’d assume they were trying, after the fact, to get back what they’d given up to get me to buy. And no way I’d consider that to be reasonable.
I can accept administrative errors after the deal is made but not yet implemented as just that. And I’d go pay the 300 I properly owed, only grumbling about the need to make a separate trip. But if the quote and the write-up were simply incorrect versus what the salesman should have offered (or wished now that he’d offered then), well tough on him and his store. He can come get his merchandise if he *really *wants it.
I have a different question for the folks who climbed up on their high horses. What if the deal was verbally agreed at $1500, written up at 1500 and the cashier accidentally punched 1800 into the CC terminal and you signed for 1800 without noticing the difference? 25 days later when your CC bill comes you’re reviewing the transactions and spot the goof. $300 in their favor. Oops.
Now what do you do? More importantly what do you expect them to do when you point out the goof?
Honesty either works both ways or it’s not really honesty. One-way honesty is properly called something else; something much less virtuous sounding.
I’ve ran into the “I accidentally undercharged you, is there any way we can fix this?” scam several times in several different types of businesses. It’s nothing other than trying to milk extra money from people who feel bad about costing someone money, there is virtually no risk in trying it and even if it works 1 in 100 times you are ahead.
A month later? Nope. In fact, if someone tried this before the furniture was delivered, I’d probably just cancel the sale entirely.
I’ve had salesmen try to guilt me into paying more than I wanted to for items. Sorry - not my fault that you chose this job and it doesn’t pay you enough. Just because I can afford this item doesn’t mean I owe you more because my financials are better than yours.
I don’t even think offering that the store could come pick up the furniture is a reasonable arrangement. It doesn’t necessarily get you back to the status quo ante position.
As the customer you may have taken specific actions relying upon the transaction going through at the agreed upon price. Perhaps you already paid someone to haul away old furniture?
Then the store comes and picks up the “mispriced” order and you are left with what? An empty room with no sofa, chairs, dining room table, bed, or whatever? No way.
The true cost for the store to get you back to the status quo ante is likely more than the $300 difference. They should suck it up and stand by the agreed upon price.
I’m the kind of person who’s handed the cashier back cash when he gave me change thinking I had handed him a $20 instead of a $10, but there’s no way I’d give this store any more money. They quoted me a price, I agreed to purchase furniture at that price, and we completed the transaction. If their salesman charged me less than he should have, that’s a personnel issue and needs to be sorted out internally, it’s got nothing to do with me. The furniture is mine legally, morally, and ethically at this point, and they’re probably going to lose me as a customer by trying to scam me.
I don’t get offering to let them pick up the furniture, once you’ve paid money, gotten a receipt, and had it delivered it is yours by any standard. If they really want to roll back the transaction for the furniture, they’d need to pay me full value for all of my time involved in looking, the initial negotiation, accepting delivery, arranging the furniture, putting stuff on it (making beds, filling shelves), breaking it down, and waiting for and watching their movers, which is probably going to be more than the $300 difference by itself, plus rental of other furniture to use in the interim for me to use until I have a chance to select and get a new set delivered. Oh, and delivery/pickup of the rental furniture too.
Not sure what point you’re getting at. As a business, if I write up something as $1500 and then charge $1800 and the customer contacts me a month later, after paying, saying, hey, I have this contract/written quote/email here saying you’d charge me $1500 for XYZ services and I just noticed you charged me $1800 then, yeah, I’d refund them the $300 right away–this isn’t even a question. I don’t understand your "moral high-horse"stuff.
Now, if I sent them a contract for $1800 and, while swiping the credit card or entering the credit card info into my phone app or whatever, I slipped up and typed $1500, then, yes, in that case, I’d ask them for the $300. But if I sent them a written contract for $1500 where I meant $1800, and they sign it, I cash the check, and then I notice the error, I’m shit out of luck.
We all make mistakes and have to eat them sometimes. That is just the cost of doing business.
They should consider the $300.00 they are out to be added to staff training. It is the only way for them to improve the situation. Otherwise they will continue to make mistakes like this and contact customers after the sale and ask for additional money.
I had a version of this happen to me. It involved a piece of medical equipment. The company did their due diligence contacting my insurance company (which I verified) but because of a corporate buyout the insurance company came back and said they woudn’t honor the original company’s contract.
I asked what they thought was an equitable cost for the equipment and they asked for the factory cost (which I was able to verify). To me, this was a reasonable request. My option was to return the item or pay it. I paid it.
From a moral standpoint you should be willing to pay a reasonable price for something. People make mistakes all the time. That doesn’t release you from your obligations. If a car dealer mistypes a decimal point you shouldn’t expect to get a Corvette for $8,000.
I bought an oven earlier this year. some one goofed at the appliance store and put the wrong sales price on the oven. The sales man honored the price on the oven. It was about $400 less than the asking price.
If you knew the sales man wrote down the wrong price then by principal you should have corrected it. But if you thought that was the price then the salesman made a costly mistake and it is his and he needs to own it.
OTOH, if the car dealer quotes you $48,000, writes up a contract and bill of sale, and you pay for the car and drive off, then a month later says that oh no, it was really $51,000 and you owe him $3000, EVEN IF IT WAS A MISTAKE you don’t owe him one red cent, because you had a deal and stuck to the deal.
I don’t believe that’s entirely true. The lawyers on this site can address that better than I can.
There is definitely a certain “sucks to be you” aspect in any contract. So I’m not disagreeing with you.
I was mostly addressing the moral aspect of paying a reasonable fee for a product or service. I’ll give another example. I had a new roof put on years ago. It was a young contractor who gave a very good price. It turns out there was some misunderstanding with the nature of my roof’s substrate. It added considerable labor to the deal. Some of his workers walked off the job. I asked him what he would have charged. It was $400 more. Still a very reasonable price. I agreed to pay. The next estimate I had was from someone who pulled up in a very expensive truck. It was considerably more. I thought I got a very good deal and felt the contractor should at least receive a nominal fee for services rendered.
Now if a business insists on screwing itself over a mistake and stick to a bad deal I’m not going to throw a fit over it. That’s their call. I don’t want to hurt a business I might need down the road.
I would contact the store manager and ask him if he knew that his employee was dunning me for money. I wouldn’t be surprised if the manager was surprised to hear about it.
Then I would email them an offer to return the items, if they wanted, for a full refund, provided they made the charge back today and then came and got their furniture the next day.
Then I’d take my business elsewhere.
I wouldn’t care about having an empty living room. It’s just temporary. They wouldn’t owe me anything, provided they concluded the return promptly. If it was a genuine mistake, I’d give them their stuff back. Put I wouldn’t pay extra for it, it would bug me.
I bet though that the manager will be shocked by this.
I’d be furious and start by calling or going to the store to rip the owner of the store and the salesperson a new asshole. Unless, I got a written apology for this scam, I’d take to social media to trash the store’s name.
I hate this fucking scam, I’ve seen too many friends have this crap pulled on them by car dealers.
Perhaps I’m naive, but I’m surprised about how many people assuming it’s a scam. My guess is the salesman made a genuine error that was only picked up when they checked their accounts at the end of the month. The salesman is then told it’s coming out of his pay, so decides (either with or without the agreement of management) to see if he can avoid the issue by getting the OP to pay. They probably just didn’t think through how bad this looks from the other side of the fence. I agree with the general feeling that you shouldn’t pay and they need to own their mistake.
And there is something particularly egregious about the “we” “fixing” this, playing on every kind of good instinct to cooperate and improve something, to take advantage of someone. This is the kind of con only good people would fall for.
People who do this should all be forcibly flown to Nigeria.
