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

arstechnica.com

51–60 of 71 posts

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

#51
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it wasn't purchased from an authorized Dell retailer then Dell really has nothing to do with it. With the way 3rd party Amazon Marketplace sales works, who knows what happened here.

What nonsense is this? The monitor is within the warranty period and failed. Dell didn't deal with their warranty issue in an honest and direct way. They suck. No other details matter. The end.

[dead]

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

#53
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What nonsense is this? The monitor is within the warranty period and failed. Dell didn't deal with their warranty issue in an honest and direct way. They suck. No other details matter. The end.

OP bought a 2nd hand product with expired warranty. Retailer sold it as new is a fraud by Amazon not Dell.

"expired" meaning Dell arbitrarily decided that they didn't want to honor their warranty because of course they didn't. Bought as new but so what? Resale doesn't magically make their products any more or less crap.

If Amazon committed fraud here, Dell are the victims and can deal with it. But Dell have a reputation and it is deserved. Ring them up sometime to discuss it with them, go on, try talking to them about anything.

Why are you sticking up for a bazillion dollar company behaving badly?

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

#54
post #43
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What nonsense is this? The monitor is within the warranty period and failed. Dell didn't deal with their warranty issue in an honest and direct way. They suck. No other details matter. The end.

No, companies warranties start to expire from the point of original sale not whenever you happened to get it. What you’re complaining about is no different than expecting a used car to still have the original manufacturer’s warranty, that just not how warranties work. The real moral of this story is to never buy electronics from Amazon. Amazon sold you a fraudulent product and you’re blaming Dell for Amazon’s failure…

I strongly doubt the warranty period expired from first sale. I strongly doubt there was a previous sale. More likely Dell screwed up their warranty database. But sure, Amazon suck very hard. Dell are at least as bad. Who do you talk to /when/ they make a mistake in their favour.

Much easier to tell people to f.off when they're not standing in front of you in your shop holding the crap goods. Amazon and Dell both push that with suppliers & customers.

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

#55
post #21

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 pric…

I just assumed retailers do this constantly and buyer beware. Is this not standard behavior? MSRP is so often completely made up with frequent arbitrary sales. Curious what law this is breaking.

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

#56
post #34
post #4

The amount of research that needs to be done to purchase even the most basic stuff online is beyond paralyzing. I hate shopping irl but I think I hate online shopping even more.

Does anyone remember killerapp.com? It had parametric search for tech products along the dimensions you actually cared about, and then a ranking of sellers by total price, including shipping and any applicable tax. Exactly what you wanted. Compare today: we have major retailers demanding exclusive SKUs to prevent apples-to-apples comparisons, and it doesn't matter anyway because most people are Amazon Prime members a…

Even if you can get an accurate matrix of models, you then discover that the metric in question is horribly gamed. TDP is now effectively useless because both Intel and AMD lie in their own ways. "55 inch class" screens. "QLED" hoping to trick consumers vs OLED.

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

#57
post #30
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?

DELL uses pricing based on some unknowable calculus based on competitor products. So they show their monitor as a "sale" relative to competitor XYZ's monitor.

Reality is that the product is just cheaper and worse than the competitor.

This computer was purchased based on one of these "sales". In terms of raw performance, it seemed like a decent deal. It was not. The issue isn't just their monitors, so I am a bit confused as to why this fine singles out monitors.

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

#58
post #47
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…

I don't like Dell as a company, but I've owned XPS laptops for years and haven't been able to find something I like better. The only real problem I have with it seems to be a Windows problem that other laptops also have (modern standby). My other complaint was with Waves MaxxAudio, but it hasn't bothered me on my latest XPS the way it did on the older ones. Not sure if that problem is fixed or if I just got in some s…

I actually get around modern standby by simply replacing sleep with hibernate on everything. It takes longer to start up, but at least the PC isn't burning hot, or wasting battery.

Waves is... incredibly annoying. Could be worse I suppose, but I wish it wasn't a thing. The computer will randomly shut off the audio jack so it makes audio issues even harder to diagnose. The number of times where I was monkeying around trying to figure out what was causing it. Ugh.

I find that it usually involves 3 steps. The audio\mic quality downgrades, then entirely shuts off the mic, then shuts off audio.

I have a Inspirion(?) G7 7790. It's an old machine by today's standards, but it has had many problems from the start.

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

#59

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…

Connectors like HDMI ports should not be the first point of failure, especially in monitors. That sounds like planned obsolescence.

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

#60
post #21

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 pric…

I just assumed retailers do this constantly and buyer beware. Is this not standard behavior? MSRP is so often completely made up with frequent arbitrary sales. Curious what law this is breaking.

In Australia there are certain requirements on how long a product must be at a price before you can advertise it as discounted, and say things like "save 50%".

This is to prevent this exact practice where a store either lies and slaps a discount sticker on it without any discount to mislead a consumer, or from them putting up the price for 24 hours and then discounting it.

There is no exact length of time, the law says "reasonable". So it'd be up to a court to decide.

You can learn more here https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/pricing/price-displays

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