Sale contract rights

Money-Saving-King

Computersaysno wrote: »

Money saving king...what about you?


Have you ever issued papers/been to court?

Not as of yet as I have very good communication skills and have always have a result that any company is legally bound to deliver before needing to make legal threats.

I do wonder what has gone wrong when someone needs to go down the MCOL route 6 times!

vaio

lucy03 wrote: »

If the retailer breached the contract they will be expected to put you back in the position you were in before.........

Do they? I thought they would be expected to put you back in the position you would have been in had the breach not occurred.

timbstoke

vaio wrote: »

Do they? I thought they would be expected to put you back in the position you would have been in had the breach not occurred.

Depends. If the contract has been frustrated, for example because the retailer is out of stock, then a court will usually be quite happy to revert to a refund. In the current case of a fairly clear misprice, I can't see a court giving OP more than a refund unless she can show that she believed the price was genuine and has since incurred costs as a result of the cancellation - i.e. loss of bargain.

lucy03

vaio wrote: »

Do they? I thought they would be expected to put you back in the position you would have been in had the breach not occurred.

Apologies, my wording was vague, yes you're right and that's probably a better way of phrasing it.

What I was trying to suggest really is that in practical terms for the OP, at the small claims court track, the situation is more if a retailer acts unreasonably then the judge is likely to want the consumer put back into the position they were in. This then enters the loss of bargain argument, which is difficult and tenuous at the best of times, which gives the court the power to do that. Unfortunately my opinion is that the retailer hasn't really been unreasonable here.

lucy03

Money-Saving-King wrote: »

Probably just a cost thing as to whether they thought they'd win or not. They probably figured it was cheaper to pay you, if it was defended they'd have to pay the high cost of legal staff to represent them.

I still think your advice is putting the op at risk.

You've got to bare in mind it's just money/business here, not right or wrong. They'll pay out if it's cheaper to do. I think what's happened to you in the past has given you a false understanding of how things work through basically luck.

This matches my experience. In the company I used to work for we'd get about ten claims a month, of which most were just people who hadn't really tried to communicate with us and had gone straight to court. We'd pay because they were probably broadly right, although they'd have got the same result if they'd communicated better.

But equally we'd defend the ridiculous claims, and we'd usually win. It cost more money than it was worth, but we weren't going to let unfair claims go through if we could help it. At higher courts the arguments are always far more about legal technicalities, the small claims court track is far more about just who has acted reasonably with regards to the law. That's rather inevitable given individuals rarely have legal advisers in the small claims court track.

My advice would always be communicate as much as is reasonably possible with the company. Asking them for their final position is often useful as it confirms that the company has thought about it and has offered all that they're going to. I suspect in many company, certainly ones I know, that a request for a final position is usually sent to the legal team anyway because it's the practical equivalent of a letter before action.