As I see it, today nearly everything is made in China, particularly clothing.........so don't waste your money buying expensive sh*t, just buy cheap sh*t......they are all guaranteed to fall apart around the same time. I needed new spectacles......prescription demands complex lens, so with a 'recognised specialist' optician, they were going to cost about £300. A quick check with one of the 'multi emporiums' inferred they would cost about £140 (with the same cost frame). The specialist reckoned they would give me a better service......when I went to pick them up, the lenses were so effing scratched, they were worse than my six year old pair......I also couldn't see through them properly...blurred, and double vision.........Even having shown them the problems, they were prepared to let me pay and walk out with them. So I have told them to stuff it........If I'm going to have to accept p*ss poor quality and service because it is a sign of the times, then I'll pay less than half for it. AL. PS....Trading Standards will normally only accept 'complaints' within three weeks of a purchase.
There was an article about this in the Sunday Times yesterday. It seems it's rife, with shops insisting their returns policy is right, but it doesn't change your statutory rights. I think you need to go armed with knowing exactly what your rights are. There are some new European regulations coming soon that will improve the lot of the consumer which suggests it's a big problem. The article also suggest you pay with a credit card as you get a degree of cover for goods purchased but I wonder if that's made things worse with shops believing you can get your money back that way.
Lukasz, you need to read a book on game theory. Shops, like any business, are only nice to you as they see the transaction as a repeatable game whereby it is in their interest to play a cooperative game. If a game is not repeatable, then it is not in their interest to be cooperative, but to take as much from the transaction as possible and give as little as possible in return. A game may be deemed repeatable if word of mouth by a pissed-off customer (you) would prevent others from frequenting the shop. So for a shop like Armani, say, having invested a lot of marketing money to gain their reputation and support their premium pricing, one disgruntled customer (you) is not really going to have much affect on them. So they don't need to be nice to you. On the other hand, a Ducati dealer offering crap service may be rubbished by a forum such as this one and bearing in mind that the pool of potential customers is fairly tiny in business terms, they would be wise to make sure that their service was always up to scratch and their reputation kept intact. You might think it's a question of ethics - and I would tend to agree with you. But real game theory doesn't see things like this. The only ethic is self-interest. This is often best served by cooperation, but not always.
Indeed, and we may ask where do ethics derive from anyway? At root, always from self-interest. Obviously that does not mean the short term selfishness of one human being. It can mean long-term self interest, and the operative unit can be the species, nation, tribe, family, individual, or it can be our genes.
Well if your genes are anything like the ones Luca bought, they will fall apart in a few weeks....:wink: AL
Interesting comparison. Thing is ethics are by default designed to be good thing, a set of ground rules that make the business good (as in ethical). If they are not they are just rules and company has no ethics. Example of ethics is not taking bribes in any form even as small gifts, not lying to customers or not putting the customers\suppliers in situation where they have to brake the law to operate with you. All of those are in essence good things. What you described is just a set of rules used to make the company tick, good or bad decision is to be seen later. Gliddofglood. I would think that it should be TK maxx to kick me out. They operate by selling volume over superb quality and brand look. If me and 2 friends do not buy at TK no more rest of country will. Armani's client base is much smaller as it is up scale market so ignoring a customer at first purchase does not seem like a good tactic. Taking 3 customers away from shop that has for example million customers a year is worse then the same 3 customers not buying in shop that has 100 million customers. Statistically that is. McDonald's vs expensive restaurant is perfect example. If McD looses a customer a week spending £10 with volume they do not an issue. If a upscale restaurant where average meal comes to 100gbp looses the customer that comes one's a month they will feel it.
