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Fair Go: Can a shop make you hand back something you bought if they undercharged you?

The shop where he bought the shoes was making a resolution very challenging until Fair Go got involved.

We all love a bargain, don’t we?  Psychologists will tell you; part of the thrill is thinking you got away with something.

But what if you really have? What if the price paid was lower than the seller meant to offer?

If they want to cancel, what are the retailer’s rights and responsibilities - and what are yours?

Fair Go viewer Matt Gaffaney put that to the test recently when he bought a pair of shoes on holiday for a bargain price, only to wind up deadlocked in a dispute with the store owner, Modern Collective’s Kerikeri store.

“I saw these on a sales rack,” Matt told Fair Go, proudly displaying the single DC high top he now had in his possession.

“Tried it on and thought this is the bee’s knees. Went to the counter and [the store employee] went and grabbed another one, checked the sizes, didn't check the left and right foot.”

Matt had paid $69.99 for the pair of DC shoes – half the RRP of $139.99 – only to find when he got them out of the box the next day that he had two right shoes. That hadn’t been part of the deal.

“I returned it - on request- to have the correct one returned back to me, which they've decided now they do not want to send,” Matt explained.

Putting two rights in the box wasn’t the only mistake made by the employee at Modern Collective in Kerikeri. Little did either of them know, the price Matt paid and that she accepted was less than what it has cost the business owner to buy the stock.

Nobody discovered that mistake for 12 days. In that time, Matt had called the store; they’d emailed back and forth half a dozen times; they’d agreed if he posted one right shoe back, the store would send him a matching left and cover his postage.

It was only once Modern Collective had one shoe back that the plan changed. They now wanted Matt to go back to the post office a second time and mail back the other right shoe and they’d then refund him his $69.99, plus the postage for both.

Matt was pretty ticked off and pressed them to explain, only to be told then about the pricing error. Eventually he got hold of business owner Joel Summerlee, who reiterated the new offer and wouldn’t budge.

“From our perspective we’ve been more than fair,” Joel Summerlee told Fair Go.

“Yes, there was a bit of confusion in the beginning, down to that we had a junior part-time staff member trying to deal with it.”

Joel said the error had been picked up by him later and as soon as that happened, he had changed the offer.

“It’s not financially viable for us to honour that price and my understanding is that if a product is sold and the price is clearly incorrect or a mistake occurs, the retailers reserve the right to decline the sale," he told Fair Go.

So, who should hand over the shoe? The shop or the shopper?

Retail NZ advises retailers on the law. It told Fair Go: “In this case, the retailer should honour the sale and provide the goods to the customer.

"This reflects the fact that the sale was finalised, and the customer took possession of the goods.”

Community Law said it had been reasonable for Matt to assume the employee had the power to make the sale at the reduced price, so this was no so much about consumer rights as contract law.

It said the sale was covered under the Contract and Commercial Law Act, meaning Matt could ask the Disputes Tribunal to enforce “specific performance” of his contract with Modern Collective to provide him with the matching pair.

Community Law thought Matt had a very good case and would win, but at a cost of the $40 filing fee. And his time. And the store’s.
Modern Collective has taken all that on board and agreed: best to honour the sale.

“We're going have to sell probably three pairs of those shoes to break even,” Joel Summerlee lamented.

“We were trying to mitigate the cost to our business and at the same time, try to be fair to the customer.”

A costly lesson for the business, a hassle for the consumer, but Matt Gaffaney is a happy customer now.

He says this was a matter of principle, so he won’t be keeping the shoes.

Instead, he’s put them up for auction on TradeMe .

Whatever they fetch, he will donate 100% to I AM HOPE. That’s the charity started by Mike King to fund better access to mental health and counselling services for young people – which coincidentally is running its annual Gumboot Friday appeal this week.

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