Live data from Hacker News

I bought a Switch from Nintendo and they threatened me with legal action

headmelted.com

31–40 of 381 posts

Re: I bought a Switch from Nintendo and they threatened me with legal action

#31
post #5

Looks like you got yourself a free Switch. Enjoy it, and if your other Switch is in good condition, offer it to your son or a friend. If Nintendo threatens further legal action, take your lawyer out to dinner and spend the evening laughing over it.

I perhaps should have done, instead I took the threat seriously and took the day off work to await the courier (who collected the Switch).

So I'm down another day's income, and honestly starting to feel like a bit of a mug given the responses here.

Re: I bought a Switch from Nintendo and they threatened me with legal action

#32
post #28

This is dumb on the part of everyone involved. No, you are not taking the moral high ground by calling Nintendo customer service and initiating a back-and-forth on what to do with the mistakenly-delivered extra product. In fact, you are probably costing Nintendo more money than the second Switch is worth by doing so. There is no reason, ever, unless the cost of the item is extremely high, to initiate a conversation w…

I disagree, there's no code about this that everyone knows about. I think he did the right thing by contacting them. They did the wrong thing, obviously they should just let him keep it but some cheapskate customer service rep decided 'no we must have this thing back' and ridiculously decided threatening legal action was a good idea.

Re: I bought a Switch from Nintendo and they threatened me with legal action

#33

I have never, ever dealt with any above mid-sized company that handles customer service and delivery well. There seems to be a set of standardised industry practices that are completely and utterly customer hostile. The moment regular company employees stop dealing with customer issues, delivery, etc., and hands it over to "specialists", it's basically a crap shoot whether you can get any issue resolved at all, becau…

Actually, some of the biggest companies ever are known for their top notch customer service: Apple and Amazon.

Re: I bought a Switch from Nintendo and they threatened me with legal action

#34
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A pity that multinational companies can usually afford much better lawyers than the average Joe. It's really not the same as threatening your neighbor with a "We'll see each other in court", for a parking lot dispute.

It's a bluff. Nintendo wouldn't involve lawyers over a Switch, it makes zero financial sense. What happened likely is some tech support drone made a threat, which the corporate never approved.

[deleted]

Re: I bought a Switch from Nintendo and they threatened me with legal action

#35
post #28

This is dumb on the part of everyone involved. No, you are not taking the moral high ground by calling Nintendo customer service and initiating a back-and-forth on what to do with the mistakenly-delivered extra product. In fact, you are probably costing Nintendo more money than the second Switch is worth by doing so. There is no reason, ever, unless the cost of the item is extremely high, to initiate a conversation w…

> There is no reason, ever

There are Ethical reasons

But I've heard of people contacting support for a vendor to hear "thanks for letting us know, you can keep the item" which should have probably been Nintendo's stance in this issue

Re: I bought a Switch from Nintendo and they threatened me with legal action

#36
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding in the UK is that if someone sends you unsolicited goods and then tries to bill you, it's yours to keep. But this doesn't apply to things sent to you by mistake, which certainly seems to be the case here. You are expected to return the good to the sender at their expense. Although you are expected to facilitate returning it, I doubt any court would look favourably on a company taking you to court for…

This is my understanding, too. Obviously I'd have preferred to keep it if they'd let me, but if they hadn't freaked me out with talk of legal action and been happy to say something to the effect of get it back to us within (e.g.) 30 days, I could've organised to post it at a weekend I wasn't working. I couldn't include everything in the whole exchange in the article, but they did suggest collecting it from a place of…

Have you kept a record of the courier delivery? Like a collection receipt?

If not, write them a letter, send by recorded delivery, and state that the item was collected and that this is the end of the matter.

They're almost certainly incompetent rather than malicious, so if there's another screw up you can refer them to the letter and then ignore any further correspondence.

Re: I bought a Switch from Nintendo and they threatened me with legal action

#37
post #9
post #2

How embarrassing (for Nintendo). As soon as someone threatens legal you just have to tell them you'll only be engaging via lawyers and you'll be seeking to recover your legal expenses from them once the situation is resolved.

I'm hoping this blows up in Nintendo's faces; they forgot to treat and respect their customers as fellow human beings. The writer ought to be compensated for his wasted time thanks to their incompetence.

Thanks, I appreciate your comments today as I've been getting a little worried here that the traction this article is getting this morning is going to come back to bite me in the backside.

Whether it's Nintendo or a UK-local entity they sub-contract (it's a bit unclear - either way the address is store.nintendo.co.uk and Nintendo-branded), the policies could use some work.

Re: I bought a Switch from Nintendo and they threatened me with legal action

#38
Nintendo customer support in Europe is known to be quite bad. I am a day one customer for the Switch, the controller has a defective antenna (it is a well known hardware bug) but sending it back would mean to lose a lot of time with the italian customer support and in the end have all my system data wiped out. I'll just wait for them to enable cloud savegames, buy a second Switch and sell back my current one to a retailer like Gamestop.

Re: I bought a Switch from Nintendo and they threatened me with legal action

#39
post #28

This is dumb on the part of everyone involved. No, you are not taking the moral high ground by calling Nintendo customer service and initiating a back-and-forth on what to do with the mistakenly-delivered extra product. In fact, you are probably costing Nintendo more money than the second Switch is worth by doing so. There is no reason, ever, unless the cost of the item is extremely high, to initiate a conversation w…

No, they didn't "[cost] Nintendo more money than the second Switch is worth". Nintendo could just have said, "Keep it" and only been out the cost of a support call, which is necessarily less than the cost of a Switch.

Nintendo is the one in the wrong here.

The customer wouldn't have been wrong to do nothing and keep it, but calling them and admitting the mistake is definitely the moral high-road here. It may not be the smartest thing, but that's different.

Re: I bought a Switch from Nintendo and they threatened me with legal action

#40
I had a bad experience with Nintendo Germany, when they fucked up my New Nintendo 3DS Ambassador package address, and it took over 2 weeks to find out what is happening with the item I paid for... Never again buying directly from Nintendo again, learned my lesson.
Post reply on HN