I have worked many years in customer service, in sales and in technical medium and am supervising a tech service center dealing with professional clients, so I've seen lots of this happening.
Consumers using the forums as a way to equal the level playing field.
First of all, in the consumerism world, both parties (the buyer and seller) have equal responsibility. The seller or company must be responsible and be able to deliver the goods advertised based on terms and conditions it stipulates in sales and be able to provide certain guarantees required by the law that the business entity is operating in. The consumer must also be responsible in understanding completely the terms and conditions stipulated in the sales and be able to provide payment in full in the amount of time required by the seller. In effect, when a sale occurs, the seller and buyer enters into a binding contract. This protects the seller that the goods provided or sold is provided to the consumer as it was described. The consumer should also knowingly understand what the seller sells goods wise and its condition. This makes sense since if I go into a Chinese restaurant, I expect to be served Chinese food, NOT Korean, Japanese, Greek etc.. In the same token, the consumer also expect to respect the same by expecting Chinese food to be served in a Chinese restaurant, not forcing Chinese chefs to make Italian food.
The heart of this debate between the seller and buyer now seemed to be with poor communication -- I think one poster mentioned it right.
Either the buyer poorly communicated with the seller about his intentions and expectations on the sale or the seller didn't explain it thoroughly to the buyer what to expect. Did the seller explain the ordering situation or what the goods to be expected clearly to the buyer? Did the buyer asks these questions before paying for it. When you pay for the goods, the buyer goes into a binding contract with the seller. And when you try to back out of a deal, the credit card company usually doesn't want to get involved in reverse charges and stuff like that. The key is, the buyer paid for the goods. When you pay, you signed a sales contract with the seller, because if you read your credit card agreement very carefully, you will know that you are liable for that payment.
When people have buyer's remorse, they usually and mostly have a sincere wish to cause the least trouble to try and recoup the money they spent. But what they don't realize is that, the merchant isn't doing this for free. There are charges for the merchant to complete the transactions (and this is not direct to GM but to most retailers) and of course, he or she ended up stocking the goods that you didn't want and perhaps might not get sold for days, months or perhaps longer. That is money that can be used to buy other stocks for other customers. When you stock so much stock, that's money that's not earning any interest. So it's normal for a retailer sometimes to get upset when they are stuck with goods that they thought you want but not anymore. For big corporations, we usually have a float and we refurbished them and sell them as seconds. For smaller retailers, what do you do with returned stock? Do you expect to send them back to the manufacturer?!? Sorry, for makers these days just laugh back -- what you bought you keep!! So really, they become a middle man with limited options.
It's sort of like this. You work for a company and the company pays you a good wage. All of a sudden, you got sick one day or you came in half asleep and the company feels that I will only pay you when you're not sick. Sometimes, you just can't help catching something, but you think that it's not fair because you are protected by labor laws. Yes you are, but what do you then feel if the company suddenly goes on the job forum telling every employer what a lazy bum you are, you're always sick and so forth, which is of course not entirely true and all other employers will then say, yeah sure he got what he deserved because they are acting by their own interest/proxy.
Again, the actions of GM to me is a sign of a young, inexperienced growing company. It wants to help, but lack the experience and the aptitude to do so in the time being. I am sure eventually that they will improve. Short of that, they will become like any other companies like Atari, Wang and so forth if they don't.
He never even gave them a chance. I feel that he owes GM a big apology. It probably would also be a good idea if he makes as many posts as he has about their crappy service extolling how fast GM ships their products to the US. It would only be fair as all the rude comments and threats are here to be found by Google forever.
