[jambutty]

You are entitled to a refund if the item that you buy is not of merchantable quality Madhatter or fit for purpose if you like and that is in spite of what some shops display about refunds and returned goods. Those notices have no authority in law and are put in place to try and dissuade a customer from demanding a refund. The various guarantees offered by the manufacturer do not even come into the equation. In fact when you take out one of those repair insurance things that are pushed in your face, if you do take one out you effectively sign away your right to a refund.

You cannot demand a refund if you consider the item to be of poor quality, there has to be something wrong with it or you can establish that it is not factory new. Your opinion of poor quality is just that, your opinion and to make that one stick you have to get an expert in that field to testify on your behalf.

You do not have to produce a receipt to make your claim. There are other ways to prove that the bought item came from a particular store and you paid for it. However a receipt does establish without question where you bought the item.

In spite of what some stores state, you do not have to return the packaging but you do have to return any extras, like manuals, leads, pipes etc. However if you do have the box the item came in and all its insides the store will be more inclined to give a refund more readily and you won’t have to argue your case over a protracted period of time.

You can return an item and demand a full refund without reason providing that the packaging has not been opened, you can establish without a doubt that you bought the item in that shop and it is within the time specified – usually 7 days. This applies particularly to CD’s, DVD’s and software. Once the seal has been broken you can only claim a REPLACEMENT if the contents are duff. This is to prevent copying.

There is no time limit on when you can return the goods. But that will depend on the item and its record of reliability. Today you can buy a TV or radio and the like and expect them to last for several years before being in need of a repair. If it develops a fault after two years you can still claim a full refund. Whether you get it or not is up to the store as they will argue that it will be repaired. You have to argue back or accept a repair. If you buy the latest gizmo that does not have a reliability record, like TV’s in times gone by, your refund time is limited to the duration of the manufacturer’s guarantee. In the old days, valves and the tube were not guaranteed because it was an established fact that they deteriorate over an unspecified period of time. Even today you have no refund rights on light bulbs except for the new low energy long lasting types, which carry a guarantee of life.

A store can insist on having an engineer inspect the item to establish that the fault you describe is a reality. This could mean the item being returned to the manufacturer but not at your expense. Your claim is against the seller and no one else so if the shop wants verification of faulty goods it is up to the shop to bear the cost, not you or accept your word.

However the Sale of Goods Act does not apply to motor vehicles but can apply to second hand goods. That will depend on what the terms of sale are. An item sold ‘as new’ or ‘nearly new’ takes on the mantle of being fit for purpose over a period of time applicable to the new item.

I never said that I had a list of things to say MUMMIBOO. What I did say was that I had the facts firmly in my head and any documents necessary to hand. Please read what was written and not put your own spin on what you think your read.

You may well have 5 years experience of customer service but I have very nearly 52 years experience as an adult customer. I’ve been round the ‘buying goods’ block many times and encountered shop keepers with varying attitudes to returned goods. If a customer is entitled to a refund by law and the shop refuses and offers a repair or a replacement then I will stand my ground in any shop come what may. They can send for all the security they like but it wouldn’t put me off and woe betide anyone who laid a finger on me. Adding assault to refusing to comply with the law would make an interesting case and the shop would lose.

Your attitude to customer complaints MUMMIBOO is typical of many stores and they get away with it because most customers are wimps and will complain to their spouse/neighbours but melt when confronted with a store manager.

But answer me one thing. If perchance someone returned faulty goods to your store and forced you to make a refund, what happens to the defective item? I KNOW what should happen! I also KNOW what does happen and it is not the same thing. Many years ago when Comet had a small shop on Darwen Street in Blackburn with the main warehouse in Wigan I was the hi fi salesman. We had customers bring back equipment that had failed and they got a refund or a replacement. The defective item went upstairs to be repaired by the resident engineer and put back in its box ready to be sold to the next mug. Sorry I mean customer.

My son recently managed to persuade me to get a mobile phone so that on the few occasions that I am away from my flat I could call for help should I ever need it. To placate his concern I bought one from Play.com in Jersey and within a few days it arrived. The box was torn and the seal was broken. The Simm card had been removed from its plastic holder and put back in an attempt to make it look like it had never been removed. The battery was not in the slot designed for it in the packaging and the mobile phone’s cover was separated from the phone and stowed loose in the box. On inspection there were tiny scratches on the battery contacts indicating that it had been put in place at some time. There were similar scratches on the Simm card. Obviously the phone had been despatched to someone at some time and had been returned for some reason so when I ordered it they just sent it on to me. This happens far more often than people realise.

The phone went back as quickly as it came and within 5 days my credit card was reimbursed and so was the postage that it cost me to return it plus a verbal apology over the phone when I first breached the complaint.

Several years ago I bought a TV from Comet (my favourite electrical retailer) but when I got it home it turned out that when reading Ceefax or Teletext many of the letters were not being displayed. I knew that a weak signal could be the cause but by borrowing my daughter’s TV I established that weak signal was not the cause. My TV in her house still had missing letters. The manageress at Comet tried to argue against making a refund but as I knew that they had in house engineers I insisted that one of them came out, plugged the TV in and saw for himself that my complaint was justified. When the manageress saw the defect with her own eyes she had no option but to make a refund – although it was with bad grace.

The other side of the Comet coin is that when my old fridge freezer died a couple of years back, Comet bent over backwards to deliver the one that I bought to replace my dead one so that I could get my frozen goods back into a freezer before they melted. They even knocked me something off the price because it was the only model that they had and it had been on display and they didn’t make a delivery charge either. Two of their staff volunteered to make the delivery in their own transit van and the manager gave them time off in the late morning to do so. I had to insist that they accept a tenner each for their trouble.

Now that is customer service.