Product Broken? Retailer Ignoring You? Sue Them, and Win!

Have you ever purchased an expensive piece of electronic equipment along with an extended warranty only to have that product break during the warranty period… wait, I’m not done yet… but then when you try to contact that company (Circuit City, this means you!) you find out that they dodge you like a stray bullet? Well, you’re not alone.

Here’s a story of a man in New Jersey that had a problem with a Dell laptop and found a basically fool-proof way to get that problem solved!

PARAMUS, N.J. (AP) — After five months and 19 phone calls to Dell employees, a New Jersey man sued the computer giant for losing his laptop, and his novel method of doing it has paid off.

Pat Dori, of Hackensack, sued Dell Inc. in small claims court, and had the papers delivered to a Dell kiosk at a shopping mall in Paramus rather than to the company’s headquarters in Texas.

When no one from Dell appeared in court to answer the complaint, Dori won a $3,000 default judgment, and a ruling empowering court employees to shutter the kiosk and seize merchandise there if the judgment was not paid.

Now, Dell has settled the case out of court. Neither side would reveal terms.

Dori, 49, said he hopes his experience will inspire other aggrieved customers to stand up to big companies.

“I think any regular person can do this,” he told The Star-Ledger of Newark for Friday’s newspapers. “But the key is to have the law on your side — and to get them at the kiosk.”

If you follow the logic, there is no reason this exact same tactic wouldn’t work at any giant retailer like Circuit City, Best Buy, Sears, etc. It costs very little so file a claim in small claims court and you don’t need a lawyer to do so and if you have the papers served to your local retail store then the clock starts ticking for them to deal with it.

At that point I see three possible outcomes:

1. They know you’re serious because you’ve already served them papers. Now they can take care of the defective product like they should have to start with plus the court costs so far and a little something extra for your frustration and time.
2. They can spend far more on legal fees to pursue the matter in court than it would cost them to do the first option.
3. Someone can drop the ball and never get the documents to their legal department in time, in which case you get a judgement for option number one.

Of course before you go doing all that you better make sure that you’ve tried pursuing every reasonable course of action and that you’ve documented your attempts to settle the matter thoroughly. You may have to stand in front of a judge and provide a time line of what you’ve done including names, dates, actions promised, etc.

Read the original article here.