PC World 16 year court case in today's DM

InkZ

I would have just bought an external modem rather than have all that hassle.

Power to the little people etc etc, yeah whatever. I like the easy life.

sirwiggum

PC World should've correctly advised on the functionality ie. if it contained an internal modem.
It didn't.

As a gesture they could've given or discounted a PCMCIA modem.

My dad was looking a machine with a serial port a couple of years ago. He went without me and was sold a machine. It had several USB slots but no serial ports. We resolved this via a USB - serial adaptor.

PC World is a front for a finance / electronics insurance company, which also happens to sell a few computers.

Caveat Emptor though. The customer should've done a bit of research, albeit the internet wasn't as mainstream as it is now. Demo models on the shelf, the sales leaflets with specs etc. would've advised on this.
Mind you, people do go to establishments with the hope that they'll speak to an expert. You could go to a car dealer with a specific requirement for a vehicle and hope that they'd cater for your needs.

HFC became known as HSBC a couple of years ago.

Would the defaults not have fallen off after 6 years? His credit file from 2004 onwards should be back to where it is? It read like he went into bankruptcy paying solicitors fees?

londonTiger

sirwiggum wrote: »

Would the defaults not have fallen off after 6 years? His credit file from 2004 onwards should be back to where it is? It read like he went into bankruptcy paying solicitors fees?

I think it was more like "I'm bankrupt" as a figure of speech as in I have no more money left, rather than formal bankruptcy. If he loses the case he will have to go bankrupt because he will be asked to pay the other parties legal bills.

pmartin86

Probably missing something, was this heard? what was the result?

londonTiger

sirwiggum wrote: »

PC World should've correctly advised on the functionality ie. if it contained an internal modem.
It didn't.

Typical of retail outlets. Pay people minimum wage and get the expertise and experience of a minimum wage employee. PC world/currys has improved since then - not uncommon to find people in their late twenties and middle aged people working for them - assuming in a more reasonable salary than minimum.

When I was working in retail aged 17 I remember the !!!!!!!! my 17 year old colleages used to spout just to get the sale.

Maybe the sales clerk did misinform and say it has a modem - maybe the buyer just had buyers remorse and didn't like the laptop and decided to use the modem as an excuse to back out of the contract - we'll never know.

What I will say is that I personally would never take the word of the salesman and neither should anyone else. it's your money and their commission at the end of the day.

matttye

Guy says "I want a laptop with a modem."

Guy is sold a laptop without a modem.

Why should he pay a penny more when he was blatantly missold?

People don't know everything about everything and sometimes have to take the advice of shop staff to point them in the right direction.

tinkerbell28

matttye wrote: »

Guy says "I want a laptop with a modem."

Guy is sold a laptop without a modem.

Why should he pay a penny more when he was blatantly missold?

People don't know everything about everything and sometimes have to take the advice of shop staff to point them in the right direction.

Was he though? Were you there? From what I see PC world have NEVER admitted liability or miss selling.

So how is it "blatant". More he said/she said.

matttye

tinkerbell28 wrote: »

Was he though? Were you there? From what I see PC world have NEVER admitted liability or miss selling.

So how is it "blatant". More he said/she said.

Because no one battles for a decade and a half and spends vast sums more in legal fees than the cost of the laptop itself when they were wrong in the first place.

This guy values his principles above all else. I think it's admirable.

londonTiger

matttye wrote: »

Because no one battles for a decade and a half and spends vast sums more in legal fees than the cost of the laptop itself when they were wrong in the first place.

This guy values his principles above all else. I think it's admirable.

Emm it looks like he was forced to battle for 10 years. He won the first lawsuit. Second lawsuit was forced onto him by the ither part, and third lawsuit is really no choice - he has to sue to get his legal fees for first and second lawsuits.

Anyway - doesn't prove he was right. There are plenty of belligerent people out there who will fight because they have a big ego and want to prove people wrong. Like that lady with the £2 clothes pegs earlier in the thread.

He might end up losing his modest ex-council house if he loses now. Some principles..

Some fights are not worth fighting - if he loses he's f****d. If he wins he gets a tiny compensation - most of which go to pay legal fees.

VictimOfImpersonation

You've gone off half-cocked in this thread Tiger. You didn't read the case notes properly and made the mistake of calling it a mail order sale, and now you are knocking Durkin for knocking's sake.

Don't. You seem to be old enough and perhaps experienced as an erstwhile employee of DSG to understand the laptop market in 1998, but perhaps I misunderstand you? If you were indeed participating in it, then please think again and re'align your comments with the market of the day. If you were not, then your comments are perhaps best kept to yourself.

At the time that guy bought his laptop wifi routers were definitely not available to the public and hotspots were a mere glint in someone's eye. The only way to connect a laptop to the Internet was either via ethernet cable connection to a friendly network, or via a modem, usually analogue, and IIRC maximum speed[STRIKE] 32Mbps[/STRIKE] ... oops! *32Kbps.

Typical leading internet providers were AOL and Compuserve ( they later merged). Google was unheard of, Compaq were leaders in laptops. Search engines used were typically altavista or yahoo. Compaq actually paid serious money to buy altavista. Microsoft didn't even imagine what search engines would become. Internet marketing was thought of as a fad which perhaps every business ought to keep an eye on, but not much more. Few thought that it would ever become a mainstream marketing channel.

The internet was not yet a comprehensive universal library for everything imagineable. It was frustratingly less than the local library in many respects. You could if you knew where to look begin to download 3MB mp3's using applications like Winamp. It took ages!

PCMCIA modems were expensive. Separate modems were irritating.

Laptops were generally used for business e.g. powerpoint presentations and were expensive compared to desktops. They were not multimedia machines in any meaningful sense. They were the main way that travelling businessmen kept up to date with email and from the outset, computer modems were dual capable and could be used to send faxes directly from MS Word for example. Faxes were still very important in business. A laptop with no internal modem was hardly smart. It was a key desirable feature.

Experian and Equifax were out there but few really understood what they were about.

Now please reassess this case armed with a little more understanding of the day - I can assure you many serious business people would have done little differently to Durkin except that most were not stuck away on an oil rig somewhere whilst all the bad stuff was happening via snail mail.