Dell in BIIIIG trouble in Australia for not discounting the price of apparently discounted monitors

[thewayne]

Oooh, this was a sneaky one! The investigated period, from August '19 to the middle of December '21, they looked at people buying systems at the Australian Dell web site. People would see a monitor with a high price that was struck through and a lower price displayed. What people didn't know was that the lower price was in many cases actually higher than the price that they would pay if they'd bought the monitor on its own!

During the time in question, "...shoppers spent over $2 million Australian dollars ($1.33 million USD) on 5,300 add-on monitors..."

LUCY! YOU HAVE SOME 'SPLAININ' TO DO! IN THE COURT ROOM!

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/dell-in-hot-water-for-making-shoppers-think-overpriced-monitors-were-discounted/

Comments

[silveradept]

We can hope that the fines will be painful enough to discourage this from happening again. (They won't be, there's always more money to be gained than can be lost in the penalties.)

[thewayne]

This is why penalties should be assigned as a percentage of gross revenue.

[silveradept]

That would help. Maybe getting bit for 10-50 percent of gross company revenues for misbehaving would help stymie some of those ideas.