MONEY MORAL DILEMMA: Should Alan give the laptop back?

SkintGull

Get off your high horses you lot, those of you saying its not morally right to buy a laptop for £4 would no doubt renew your home insurance through a Quidco merchant and take you £90 cashback, even though the policy might only have been £70? Is that 'MORALLY' right? Course its not but we look at it as 'well if their daft enough to do it, i'll have it', and rightly so!

I run a small family run firm and if it happened at my store i'd hope my customers would realise that and pay the proper price but I wouldn't expect it. Large, national companies make MILLIONS every year and proabably have MILLIONS set by for errors like this so there's no way i'd be telling them!

A.Jones

sgibson wrote: »

The way I understood the original question is that the item was for sale at £399 but a mistake in the ringing in at the till (which I can only imagine as feasible if the cashier typed 399 instead of 39900/39999 into the card machine) caused the customer to be charged less than the agreed price *which they noticed* and chose not to say anything, meaning they knew the cashier had made a mistake and the cashier did not.

I understood it differently - I understood it as the price came up as £3.99 and they paid £3.99. If the printed receipt had £399 on, and the customer had only paid £3.99, then there is obviously a big difference to the receipt saying £3.99 and them paying the £3.99 in full. In the former, the customer has not paid the price in full, so the item is not theirs - but in this case, the manager would not have said that legally it was theirs, since they have not paid in full for the item. In the latter, they have paid the price offered in full.

fay144

A.Jones wrote: »

I would say that morally, the mistake is the manager's. A trainee should be trained. If a manager allows a trainee to work untrained and unsupervised in a position like this on their first day, then it is down to the manager.

I would agree that the manager is ultimately responsible, but in the real world it is the trainee would would take the blame, and there is a realy possibility they would take the financial hit.

So it's all very well to debate the high level ethical issues. But it comes down to - would you take almost £400 off someone training to work in a shop, to punish them for a momentary lapse in concentration.

samtheham

sorry but i would not be able to live with my guilt but maybe it would be rright to take it as these shops have ripped us off with inflated prices for years but not for me couldnt live with myself.

A.Jones

fay144 wrote: »

I would agree that the manager is ultimately responsible, but in the real world it is the trainee would would take the blame, and there is a realy possibility they would take the financial hit.

So it's all very well to debate the high level ethical issues. But it comes down to - would you take almost £400 off someone training to work in a shop, to punish them for a momentary lapse in concentration.

I do not need to make that decision. My transaction is with the shop. The decision I have to make is am I happy to pay the price that they offered the item to me at. The morality of the decision of who takes the financial loss is between the shop owner, the manager, the person meant to be supervising the trainee and the trainee.

Gekite

fay144 wrote: »

I once accepted a fake £20 (we had no equipment for identifying fake notes) and had it taken out of my wages. I earned £3.30 an hour at the time. For that reason, I would never accept a mistake in a shop.

Yes, legally the laptop would be yours, but you can't say that it was "gladly" offered at £3.99. It was *mistakenly* offered at that price, and at no point did the buyer genuinely believe it was the true price.

I would probably be tempted, but someone somewhere is going to have to take personal responsibility for the mistake, so I would point out the error at the till.

Maybe you might question both the legality and morality of having it removed from your wages before you allowed it to bias you opinion towards this moral question!

Why are so many people in support of the very system that would subjugate them? Is it because it is all they know?

What is all this - the true price. The only price that is of any really concern is the price it exchanges hands for, that is the only true price.

STEVEB_3

I had a similar experience.I ordered a tent online from tesco (price £25) and arranged to pick up from my local store. When I went to pick up from the customer service desk I was given a box which I took home. When I opened the box later that day I discovered that it was a carton containing 4 tents ( value £100). after a bit of deliberation revolving around some of the points of view expressed on this discussion I took the carton with the 3 unpaid for tents back to TESCO. The assistants were astonished that I had taken them back but the manager gave me a card with £25 on it to spend at tesco, so a bit of a result.

boxoffireworks

adouglasmhor wrote: »

I think it would be highly unlikely that CPS or the PF would proceed with a case on the evidence here,however if after asking for £3.99, shop insisted on £399.00 their would be a clear trading standards case to answer.

On what are you basing this assumption? Do you work in law?

A.Jones

SkintGull wrote: »

Get off your high horses you lot, those of you saying its not morally right to buy a laptop for £4 would no doubt renew your home insurance through a Quidco merchant and take you £90 cashback, even though the policy might only have been £70? Is that 'MORALLY' right? Course its not but we look at it as 'well if their daft enough to do it, i'll have it', and rightly so!

That suggests an interesting dilemma. If you see a *'ed link on MSE for a good deal that you decide to go for and, in the discussion of it, someone has posted that you can get £50 cashback via quidco, do you (i) go through the *'ed MSE link so that MSE gets the referal payment, as the MSE website informed you about it and that is the honest thing to do or (ii) go through quidco and pocket the referal payment yourself?

The_Rock-man

MSE_Wendy wrote: »

Thanks to MoneySaver Ben Clay for this idea and here's this week's hypothetical situation for you to cogitate on:

Should Alan give the laptop back?

Alan went into a shop to buy a laptop, and instead of it ringing up at £399 it was just £3.99. He spotted this at the check-out and was aware of the error but keep schtum. After he'd paid, the manager came up and admited, that the laptop was legally his, but it was an obvious error by a trainee cashier on his first day.

[threadbanner]box[/threadbanner]

Give back and pay full amount as should of pointed out that price seems low (and he saw that it was wrong), if it was pointed out and get told "that the price" by person at the till then I would take it.