Retailer denies memory replacement due to 4x increase in DDR5 pricing

theowaway213456

Here's a (flawed) thought experiment: imagine that 100% of customers' RAM suddenly goes faulty at the same time, and RAM prices have suddenly skyrocketed to infinity at the same time. Which outcome is ideal? Which one is morally correct? (A) the retailer refunds every customer, loses all of their profits and probably goes bankrupt (B) the retailer is forced to go into massive debt in order to replace everyone's RAM, and may not recover from the debt, and may face legal consequences if they can't replace the RAM (C) in the first place, the retailer should have been required to have a backup RAM stick for everyone that purchases the RAM, so that they are able to issue replacements if necessary, plus extra in case the replacements themselves are faulty. As a result, RAM prices before this incident were well over 2X the real manufacturing cost, in order to cover this "backup" cost (manufacturing, storage, etc.) (D) something else? (This is a much more extreme version of what actually happened, but maybe instructive to think about)

Cpoll

> When confronted by Goran, Umart went to the trouble of quoting the Australian Consumer Law but made a seemingly byzantine and twisted interpretation of it, reiterating that a refund at the original price was the proper remedy. Have I been living in a country with weak consumer protection for too long? I can't see refunding the product as byzantine, and I've never heard of anyone getting a refund at the new price.

rahimnathwani

It seems like Australian law gives the consumer the choice of refund or replacement, i.e. the store can't refuse to replace: https://www.accc.gov.au/business/problem-with-a-product-or-s...

tomwheeler

The article title ought to name the company (Umart). I assume they didn't because they want the clicks, but I'd argue that giving Umart the bad publicity they deserve would make companies reconsider whether to implement anti-customer policies like this.