The Morality Of Refunds

I’m the manager of a pet shop. This bloke comes in. Apparently, he’s a regular who buys lots of cat supplies — litter and food and toys and so on — and today he buys one of those self-assembly recreational climbing frames for cats sometime during the day. He brings it back sometime later and says it’s faulty, because some of the holes that should be in one of the platforms haven’t been drilled so he can’t thread the bolts through to secure the posts, or whatever.

The person on duty says to him to get another one off the shelf that he can swap with this one. But that was the only one, so he can’t replace it.

“Not to worry,” he says, “I’ll just pop up to the other branch.” This other branch is a few miles on the other side of town, and they’re bigger than our branch, so they’re more likely to have the same model in stock. And he leaves, gets in his car, and off he goes, leaving the old model with us.

He was quite right, by the way; we inspected it. He’s packed everything up in the box exactly as it came; just the bags holding the screws and things have been opened. He’s obviously got everything out and got so far putting it together, and then he’s taken it apart again and packed it up; we can tell by the scuff marks. And yes, there are holes missing in one of the platforms.

But he hasn’t got his money back at this time. He never even asked for it, just breezily left the thing here, happy as you like, and just went off.

Anyway, just as we’re about to close, we get a call from a woman who turns out to be his wife, asking if her husband can come round to get his money back. Seems he did go up to the other branch and got another climbing frame, same kind, and paid for it all over again.

He comes in the next day and says his wife tells him he may be able to get some of the money back for the one he brought back. But he can’t believe he can get all his money back. He seems to think it’s a point of morality, because he says he damaged the thing when he tried to put it up, and because he ripped open the bags, and because of the scuff-marks where he part-assembled it, it’s no longer as new, so he never dreamed he’d be able to get a refund for it. He gets quite upset about it, and at one stage he seems almost in tears at the thought that he may be causing the store to lose money, and surely it can’t be right that he should be able to sell something back to the store that he’s damaged, and it’s no longer worth as much as what he paid for it.

It takes me a good five minutes to explain to him how things work. In the end I have to say to him: look, I’m the manager of the store, and I have discretion in these matters, and I say to him, because you’re a regular customer, and because I value your custom, I’m going to do you a big favour, and I’m going to give you all your money back that you spent on this thing. He’s still not happy, but I manage to process the refund back onto his debit card, so at last, I can get the books to balance properly that week.