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Dell fined $6.5M after admitting it made overpriced monitors look discounted

arstechnica.com

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Re: Dell fined $6.5M after admitting it made overpriced monitors look discounted

#21

Post by mianos »

In Australian, a local government competition body regularly pursues this sort of fake-ass pricing. They are a great laugh once they a fined, but it is not so funny before. Here is one that is as ridiculous as the Black-Friday fake deals.

edit, here is the gist:

In July 2020, the Court found that Kogan had misled consumers by advertising over a period of four days that they could use the code ‘TAXTIME’ to reduce prices by 10 per cent at checkout, when Kogan had increased the prices of 621 products immediately before the promotion.

In most cases, the prices of these products had been increased by at least 10 per cent. Kogan then decreased those prices soon after the promotion ended, many back to their pre-promotion prices.

https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/kogan-to-pay-350000-fo....

Re: Dell fined $6.5M after admitting it made overpriced monitors look discounted

#22

Post by [deleted] »

SoftTalker wrote: post #11
bombcar wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a simple trick - they make the vendor eat any returns. So vendors won't ship them shit, because they know they'll eat the returns. I'm sure they do additional curation on top of that, but making them stand behind the product probably gets 80% of the way there.

I would never have imagined there was any other policy in retail, at least for big-ticket items like TVs and appliances. Why should the retailer ever eat the returns?

[deleted]

Re: Dell fined $6.5M after admitting it made overpriced monitors look discounted

#24

Post by Prickle »

I have a DELL laptop.

Probably the worst purchase I made. The one saving grace is that SupportAssist actually works, and does make post-crash/post-windows-death recovery very simple and easy.

But that's the thing. I can tell that they put effort into this OS recovery tool, explicitly because this Laptop is a disaster of a product. Temperatures? Burning. Fans? Locked down. Freezing? Constantly. Crashing? Commonly. Blue screens? Less common now, but used to be frequent.

Just had to do another OS recovery yesterday. But hey, it breaks constantly like a Russian Lada, and can be "fixed" relatively quickly and easily.

Re: Dell fined $6.5M after admitting it made overpriced monitors look discounted

#25

Post by S201 »

kstrauser wrote: post #16

I won’t buy Dell gear again, at home or at work. I bought my kid a monitor for his gaming PC from Amazon. It was advertised as brand new. Dell shipped it in a brand new, undamaged, unopened box. Its HDMI port failed a couple of months later but with many months of warranty left. Then Dell denied a warranty claim because their inventory system had it listed as having been previously registered to someone else. I tried…

> In before “how do we believe you?”

A company trying to weasel out of its warranty obligations is hardly something I'd cast doubt on anymore (unfortunately).

Re: Dell fined $6.5M after admitting it made overpriced monitors look discounted

#26

Post by kstrauser »

S201 wrote: post #25
kstrauser wrote: post #16

I won’t buy Dell gear again, at home or at work. I bought my kid a monitor for his gaming PC from Amazon. It was advertised as brand new. Dell shipped it in a brand new, undamaged, unopened box. Its HDMI port failed a couple of months later but with many months of warranty left. Then Dell denied a warranty claim because their inventory system had it listed as having been previously registered to someone else. I tried…

> In before “how do we believe you?” A company trying to weasel out of its warranty obligations is hardly something I'd cast doubt on anymore (unfortunately).

You and me both, but someone’s always gotta be a contrarian.

Re: Dell fined $6.5M after admitting it made overpriced monitors look discounted

#27

Post by s1artibartfast »

SoftTalker wrote: post #11
bombcar wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a simple trick - they make the vendor eat any returns. So vendors won't ship them shit, because they know they'll eat the returns. I'm sure they do additional curation on top of that, but making them stand behind the product probably gets 80% of the way there.

I would never have imagined there was any other policy in retail, at least for big-ticket items like TVs and appliances. Why should the retailer ever eat the returns?

There are tons of reasons. Most importantly , the retailer controls the point of return, setting terms and allowing or refusing them.

Re: Dell fined $6.5M after admitting it made overpriced monitors look discounted

#28

Post by terribleperson »

kstrauser wrote: post #16

I won’t buy Dell gear again, at home or at work. I bought my kid a monitor for his gaming PC from Amazon. It was advertised as brand new. Dell shipped it in a brand new, undamaged, unopened box. Its HDMI port failed a couple of months later but with many months of warranty left. Then Dell denied a warranty claim because their inventory system had it listed as having been previously registered to someone else. I tried…

Not to defend Dell, because they don't deserve it and should have stood by their product, but it's possibly true that the monitor was used, and not their fault that it was. 'Sold by Amazon' products are AFAIK commingled with the same product from other sellers that are Fulfilled By Amazon.

Re: Dell fined $6.5M after admitting it made overpriced monitors look discounted

#29

Post by seanmcdirmid »

dbetteridge wrote: post #19
yieldcrv wrote: post #3

Wait you can be fined for that? The state should make a bounty program, Prime Day and Black Friday are about to be the only times I work!

Australia We have some very strong consumer laws especially around deceptive pricing and expectations of the life of appliances

I believe France has laws like this also (restrictions on what can be advertised as a "sale" at least).

Re: Dell fined $6.5M after admitting it made overpriced monitors look discounted

#30

Post by sowbug »

Prickle wrote: post #24

I have a DELL laptop. Probably the worst purchase I made. The one saving grace is that SupportAssist actually works, and does make post-crash/post-windows-death recovery very simple and easy. But that's the thing. I can tell that they put effort into this OS recovery tool, explicitly because this Laptop is a disaster of a product. Temperatures? Burning. Fans? Locked down. Freezing? Constantly. Crashing? Commonly. Blu…

Sorry about your bad experience, but what does this story have to do with misleading monitor pricing?
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