Faulty office chair consumer rights

sheramber

If the OP bought it in October 2019 and contacted the retailer in June 2020 would he not have had to prove a manufacturing fault at that time, since it was over 6 months since he bought it?

The retailer may have made a goodwill gesture to accept the return at that time without such proof  since the country had been on lockdown

On the ohter hand mat be the person who replied  wrongly advised it could be returned without a report.


Since lockdown only finisihed on 15 June it is possible the person dealing with the enquiry was not experienced in the rules for returning items.

Grumpy_chap

ForumUser7 said:

The retailer has not disputed that they received the email during this follow up.

Not disputing receipt is not the same as positively confirming receipt.
Particularly if the email went to an individual's account within the business and that individual left the business, the e-mail account may now be inaccessible.  I have worked for companies where leaver's e-mail is frozen and inaccessible because the employer cites data protection / GDPR as preventing the email account from being accessed.

MattMattMattUK

Grumpy_chap said:

ForumUser7 said:

The retailer has not disputed that they received the email during this follow up.

Not disputing receipt is not the same as positively confirming receipt.
Particularly if the email went to an individual's account within the business and that individual left the business, the e-mail account may now be inaccessible.  I have worked for companies where leaver's e-mail is frozen and inaccessible because the employer cites data protection / GDPR as preventing the email account from being accessed.

I totally agree, I have clients who require a rather laborious process to allow managers to access the email of another staff member, departed or otherwise. Another who has a requirement for compliance to have full access to staff members emails has a misconduct policy relating using work emails for personal communication, multiple breaches is a stackable offense because it could present a GDPR issue as the compliance team have access for audit purposes. Even my own small businesses have a ban on using work email for personal purposes and employees cannot access other's emails, although I do have access I log dates and reasons when I do this. I did have one employee who struggled with accepting this for a while (despite being a good employee overall) until an incident a customer had internally made them realise how important it actually is. 

Under no circumstances would I be going on a fishing expedition through an employees emails from four years ago to see if they may or may not have received an email and I cannot imagine many companies would.

pinkshoes

Consumer rights aside... do you not have a local repair shop that could fix it? 

Lots of pop up fix it shops where people do it for free as a hobby or a small donation.

lincroft1710

Alderbank said:

lincroft1710 said:

ForumUser7 said:

lincroft1710 said:

You use the term "office chair". If you purchased this to use as a chair for any business you may be carrying out from home then you have no rights as a consumer and this would be considered a business to business transaction

Not a business transaction - I'm a student and purchased it to use while studying. The chair was called an office chair, like home office in this context I suppose. Just one of those ones with pistons to go up and down, swivels around, on wheels etc.

Grumpy_chap said:

ForumUser7 said:

Grumpy_chap said:

You had a four-month period in 2020 to get this resolved and a full refund.
You are now four-years later, so the chair is 5 years old.  Any remedy after this time would be reduced by the amount of beneficial use you had from the chair compared to the expected life of an office chair.  That might well be a high proportion (80% - 100% deduction).  It is irrelevant that you may have not used the chair - that cannot be proven.  Any external assessor would determine you had the chair for use for 5 years.

Unfortunately that was in the middle of a pandemic, and I was clinically vulnerable so couldn’t go to the shop.

I acknowledge the pandemic impinged on everything, but could you have got a friend or relative to return the chair at any point in the four-month period?

Have you not been to a shop in the four-years since the pandemic?

The real difficulty here is you asking for "reasonable adjustments" related to a medical condition.  An extension beyond the pandemic restriction period may have been a reasonable adjustment if requested at the time.  You seem to be asking for a "reasonable adjustment" to be considered in retrospect four-years after the event.  By now, the chair would likely be showing its age regardless.

How expensive was this chair?
If you were seeking a refund of 10% of the chair's original price (reflecting the 5-years of beneficial ownership), is that really worth pursuing?

However I feel like given the case couldn't progress due to the staff member not responding to my email, I feel their originally offered resolution would only be fair. 

Not going to happen, you've had the chair for 5 years. I'm sorry but you have left it far too long to get a meaningful resolution. As soon as you decided not to pursue the matter when they didn't get back to you, that became the end of it. 

I'd be grateful if you could direct me to which part of CRA 2015 says any of that?

My understanding of the Act is as follows:

S24 Right to...final right to reject

(5)A consumer may exercise the final right to reject [when] the consumer has required the trader to repair or replace the goods, but the trader is in breach of the requirement of section 23(2)(a) to do so within a reasonable time and without significant inconvenience to the consumer.

Between June and October 2020 the OP requested the trader to arrange collection of the chair but the trader has not yet done so.
I believe a reasonable person would consider 3.5 years far in excess of a reasonable time.

The consumer's right to reject is not time-limited in any way in the regulations.

S24 (8) If the consumer exercises the final right to reject, any refund to the consumer may be reduced by a deduction for use, to take account of the use the consumer has had of the goods in the period since they were delivered, but...no deduction may be made to take account of use in any period when the consumer had the goods only because the trader failed to collect them at an agreed time.

The trader might try to argue that there was not a time agreed to collect, because they simply ignored the OP's reasonable request. 
However the court might accept that there was an implied contract term that they would collect within a reasonable time of say 1 month, so the relevant time the OP has use of the chair was perhaps Oct 2019 - Oct 2020, about 1 year.

What I am saying is that as the OP has had the chair for 5 years, they cannot expect the retailer to now offer the same solution as they did when the chair was less than a year old. The chair could easily have deteriorated further during that time. The OP should have been pro-active and pursued the matter at the time.

Alderbank

I agree absolutely that the OP's delay was unusual.

But this part of the forum is about consumer rights.
Things change at 6 months when the burden of proof shifts from trader to consumer, but my reading of the act is that from 6 months onwards they can expect the retailer to offer the same solution, at least until the limitations act might kick in.

I accept I might have misunderstood CRA, that's why I asked about your legal basis for seeing it differently.

IvanOpinion

You can buy a new piston for about £12 (eBay, Amazon etc.).
Just make sure you order the right size.
It may be the least hassle route.

RefluentBeans

Alderbank said:

I agree absolutely that the OP's delay was unusual.

But this part of the forum is about consumer rights.
Things change at 6 months when the burden of proof shifts from trader to consumer, but my reading of the act is that from 6 months onwards they can expect the retailer to offer the same solution, at least until the limitations act might kick in.

I accept I might have misunderstood CRA, that's why I asked about your legal basis for seeing it differently.

I think the argument here would be that the retailer would offer a service with the least cost to them. Acknowledging that the chair will have some mark up on it (and potentially some ‘buy back’ or other B2B contract for faulty items within some time frame), the cost effective option may be to replace for more recently bought items, and then refund with a diminished value for items bought close to the limit (6 years, in England). 

Whilst I also appreciate that the OP has reported the fault (and we usually say that ‘stops the clock’ to stop retailers dragging their feet to get the issue to go on past the 6 month mark where proof returns to the consumer) - I don’t think the stoppage of the clock is indefinite. 

This is of course all based on legal speculation - this is a fringe case as I’m sure most people would expect the situation to be resolved closer to the time of initial report than 4 years later. 

Ultimately, the retailer offering a nominal refund based on those 4 years of use is, in my opinion, in keeping with the law. 

Grumpy_chap

ForumUser7 said:

 I should highlight the retailer hasn’t currently offered any refund. They want me to get a report at my own cost, and then send it to them and they’ll consider it if it agrees there is a manufacturing defect (despite agreeing with me back in 2020).

Did they agree with you when first reported in June 2020?

You purchased a chair in October 2019.
You reported a fault in June 2020.
The supplier said they would give a full refund if you got the chair back to them by October 2020.

They might not have agreed with you.
They might just operate, even unofficially, a "no quibble" basis in the first 12 months.

lincroft1710

Judging by another post OP made they would have been no older than 16 when they purchased the chair.

ForumUser7 said:

I think I'm category M as I'm under 21