How come commerce ever works as intended?
Three recent anecdotes about drastic failures in buying goods and services:
1) We bought a tumble dryer from Currys, and returned it the next day because there was a problem with it. They emailed us to say our refund would be processed in 14 days. It wasn't. I spent months chasing them, during which time they kept insisting they'd already sent the refund and our bank must have lost it (although every time they made up a different date on which they claimed to have sent it). Currys had our money and the dryer and we had nothing. I joined a Facebook group for Currys "victims" and found lots of people who had ordered items that turned out not to be in stock and had been charged for them anyway and couldn't get refunds, or had bought gift vouchers and not had them honoured.
2) Our friends hired a builder for a garage conversion. They paid a deposit and paid a few instalments on schedule, but he kept not turning up and doing the work, so they terminated the contract. The builder claimed *they* still owed *him*, got shouty and aggressive, escalated to a debt collector and threatened to sue. Even to be able to safely cut their losses and walk away (never mind recoup what's owed to them), they now need to go through the hassle of getting a surveyor and/or multiple quotes, to document that he's only done $smallnum % of the work in return for $bignum % of the money, so that they can defend themselves in court if it comes to that, and then they need to spend more money hiring someone else to finish the job.
3) I bought a cool gift online, but the seller sent a different and lower-value item (and in hindsight I'm sure it was a deliberate scam, as I later traced the images of the item I'd tried to order to an artist who only made individual pieces, so I don't think they ever had it available or intended to sell it). I asked for a refund, and it took ages to get them to respond at all, and when they did, they would only refund me if I shipped the unwanted item to China at my own expense, which would wipe out most of the refund value. I had paid with Paypal, so I naively thought I had some protection, but Paypal completely sided with the seller. They tried to fob me off with a false comparison about how if you buy a defective item from a shop you have to pay for petrol to drive to the shop and get a refund, even though the Consumer Rights Act is very clear that the buyer is only responsible for returning goods to where they physically took possession of them, and the seller is responsible for any further shipping costs.
This post is not about how outraged I am that these things happen, but about how puzzled I am that the majority of commerce goes smoothly and satisfactorily for buyer and seller, given that these things happen and given how hard it is to prevent it and how much effort it takes to punish defectors.
Why aren't more online retailers complete scammers who take your money for items they have no intention of selling, and then make illegal demands before they'll refund you? Why don't more builders take the deposit and run, and try to bully people into paying even more for no work? Why don't more established bricks-and-mortar stores take customers' money and give them nothing in return?
Answers like "because they would go out of business" are clearly naive. Currys and the rogue builder are still going strong, and I think the dodgy online retailers routinely reinvent themselves under a new name every couple of months anyway.
And, given that even a small minority of bad actors do do these things, why aren't more consumers put off ever buying anything that's not an absolute necessity? Why doesn't the whole system collapse due to lack of trust?
Recommendations and reviews help a little, but they can be faked and gamed.
Laws help surprisingly little, if there's no one to enforce them when they are broken. Sellers (and intermediary platforms like Paypal) don't back down if you tell them they're breaking the law and cite the specific clauses that apply. The relevant laws are only civil rather than criminal, so you can't involve the police. Trading Standards is a black hole into which you can send reports but you never find out if they've had any effect (and, in Cambridgeshire, there's an added hurdle that you can't contact them directly but have to go via Citizens Advice). Courts exist, but most people aren't going to go to all that hassle unless it's a huge amount at stake, and that's almost certainly what the rogue traders are counting on: that the individual amounts are small enough that enough people will just give up to make the scam profitable overall, even if a small minority take them to court and win. Chargebacks are a possible remedy, as long as you paid by credit card and the cost is within a certain range (and you have a competent bank that doesn't take six months to process them), but, again, probably the scammers' losses to chargebacks are more than covered by the people who don't bother - especially given how high the profit margins are when you don't bother supplying a product at all.
But, again, this isn't so much a "what do you do about it when you get scammed?" post as a "how come it works >90% of the time?" post. (It's like the "given this bug I've found, how did it ever work?" phase of programming.)
Is it just that most people are good and honest? That also sounds naive and over-optimistic, but I can't think of any other explanations at the moment.
1) We bought a tumble dryer from Currys, and returned it the next day because there was a problem with it. They emailed us to say our refund would be processed in 14 days. It wasn't. I spent months chasing them, during which time they kept insisting they'd already sent the refund and our bank must have lost it (although every time they made up a different date on which they claimed to have sent it). Currys had our money and the dryer and we had nothing. I joined a Facebook group for Currys "victims" and found lots of people who had ordered items that turned out not to be in stock and had been charged for them anyway and couldn't get refunds, or had bought gift vouchers and not had them honoured.
2) Our friends hired a builder for a garage conversion. They paid a deposit and paid a few instalments on schedule, but he kept not turning up and doing the work, so they terminated the contract. The builder claimed *they* still owed *him*, got shouty and aggressive, escalated to a debt collector and threatened to sue. Even to be able to safely cut their losses and walk away (never mind recoup what's owed to them), they now need to go through the hassle of getting a surveyor and/or multiple quotes, to document that he's only done $smallnum % of the work in return for $bignum % of the money, so that they can defend themselves in court if it comes to that, and then they need to spend more money hiring someone else to finish the job.
3) I bought a cool gift online, but the seller sent a different and lower-value item (and in hindsight I'm sure it was a deliberate scam, as I later traced the images of the item I'd tried to order to an artist who only made individual pieces, so I don't think they ever had it available or intended to sell it). I asked for a refund, and it took ages to get them to respond at all, and when they did, they would only refund me if I shipped the unwanted item to China at my own expense, which would wipe out most of the refund value. I had paid with Paypal, so I naively thought I had some protection, but Paypal completely sided with the seller. They tried to fob me off with a false comparison about how if you buy a defective item from a shop you have to pay for petrol to drive to the shop and get a refund, even though the Consumer Rights Act is very clear that the buyer is only responsible for returning goods to where they physically took possession of them, and the seller is responsible for any further shipping costs.
This post is not about how outraged I am that these things happen, but about how puzzled I am that the majority of commerce goes smoothly and satisfactorily for buyer and seller, given that these things happen and given how hard it is to prevent it and how much effort it takes to punish defectors.
Why aren't more online retailers complete scammers who take your money for items they have no intention of selling, and then make illegal demands before they'll refund you? Why don't more builders take the deposit and run, and try to bully people into paying even more for no work? Why don't more established bricks-and-mortar stores take customers' money and give them nothing in return?
Answers like "because they would go out of business" are clearly naive. Currys and the rogue builder are still going strong, and I think the dodgy online retailers routinely reinvent themselves under a new name every couple of months anyway.
And, given that even a small minority of bad actors do do these things, why aren't more consumers put off ever buying anything that's not an absolute necessity? Why doesn't the whole system collapse due to lack of trust?
Recommendations and reviews help a little, but they can be faked and gamed.
Laws help surprisingly little, if there's no one to enforce them when they are broken. Sellers (and intermediary platforms like Paypal) don't back down if you tell them they're breaking the law and cite the specific clauses that apply. The relevant laws are only civil rather than criminal, so you can't involve the police. Trading Standards is a black hole into which you can send reports but you never find out if they've had any effect (and, in Cambridgeshire, there's an added hurdle that you can't contact them directly but have to go via Citizens Advice). Courts exist, but most people aren't going to go to all that hassle unless it's a huge amount at stake, and that's almost certainly what the rogue traders are counting on: that the individual amounts are small enough that enough people will just give up to make the scam profitable overall, even if a small minority take them to court and win. Chargebacks are a possible remedy, as long as you paid by credit card and the cost is within a certain range (and you have a competent bank that doesn't take six months to process them), but, again, probably the scammers' losses to chargebacks are more than covered by the people who don't bother - especially given how high the profit margins are when you don't bother supplying a product at all.
But, again, this isn't so much a "what do you do about it when you get scammed?" post as a "how come it works >90% of the time?" post. (It's like the "given this bug I've found, how did it ever work?" phase of programming.)
Is it just that most people are good and honest? That also sounds naive and over-optimistic, but I can't think of any other explanations at the moment.