Yeah, I remember that. Eventually they offered me (and everyone else) the camera at ~£100. To be truthful I didn't feel it was really worth it but more importantly I fealt guilty 'scamming' Kodak. I mean, I *knew* it was a mistake and morally I would never have been comfortable owning the thing knowing I had burned Kodak in order to get it, irrrespective of the consumer laws in force. Ok, there's something to be said for 'avenging big corporations' but I think even that's misguided.
I have worked on frontline tech. support and plain old customer support. It's quite an education (as I am sure a lot of us here know already), you never hear when you('re company) get it right but you always hear when it's wrong. Harry home user is on a quest against the
enemy and here in the UK his rights are always improving in his favour. In principle I'm not against this since most of the new consumer rights are there to legitimately protect the consumer against unscrupulous sellers. But, it apparently sets a precedent that encourages Harry home user to embark on a crusade on behalf of all of his unknown allies when he gets a swipe at BigCo.
In my experiences BigCo is less likely to do something unscrupulous than LittleCo is. Employees at BigCo probably have nothing to gain from a perceived
ripoff and whatever it was was probably accidental. Conversely I have worked for LittleCo where the opposite applied. The major difference is that LittleCo will tell him to piss off (in those words) and Harry home user will tuck his tail between his legs and oblige. When it's BigCo the opposite happens because Harry is on his crusade and he knows there is a long chain of command he needs to work his way through in order to realise his
opportunity to treat. Often he know's he's being a pratt but the corporate regime prevents anyone actually telling him this (LittleCo would have told him this long ago and nipped it in the bud there & then).
I work for a BigCo and on a hurried Friday afternoon I once accidentally entered the quantity available into the price field on our web store admin module. In effect, we were advertising 17" monitors for £37.
On the Monday we had (fortunately only) sold 15 of these monitors. To cut a long story short, we chose to honour these orders and the impact was (fortunately) bearable by my business unit. The thing is though; while Harry home user thinks he is on a quest against a large company, in fact (in my case anyhow) he is working-over a finite autonomous unit within the big corporation. Essentially it's a small business operating within a bigger one. In my case it was trivial, but for Kodak it was far less I would imagine. The damage is real and quantifiable, people likely lose jobs and all of that bad stuff.
At the end of the day though, I'd imagine that a single employee entered something somewhere in good faith (MyCo, SB, Kodak, Currys, Amazon etc.) with neither that employee nor the employer having any intention of causing anyone any harm or stitching anyone up, it's a simple human mistake and we are all of course.......
I understand that Currys got off the hook from shipping £0.01 TVs because it was determined in the courts that this was considered by Harry home user as an
opportunity to treat - meaning that anyone placing an order for a £0.01 TV would be reasonably expected to know that it was a mistake by the seller and the contract shouldn't be honoured.
In short, I hope SB have the common sense not to ship these units (not that I wouldn't want one myself!).
Ok, that's <rant/> for me, carry on.
Edit: It was Currys not Comet
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