Yes, Walmart, You Are in Fact Responsible for What You Sell

The Consumerist posted a story about a man who purchased prepaid debit cards from Walmart only to discover that the debit cards in the package were not Vanilla MasterCards as labeled but instead gift cards from other stores that had virtually no stored value left on the card. OK, so someone had tampered with the cards, and Walmart refunds the money. Nope, Walmart denied any responsibility, saying that its customer's recourse had to be against Vanilla MasterCards, the company that sells the cards. Amazingly, Walmart stuck to that position even after the local NBC affiliate got involved (like the Consumerist, it seems a good idea to warn readers that the link autoplays a video).

Every now and again I see these sorts of stories where a merchant is trying to put legal responsibility for a product back on its supplier. It does not work that way. The customer's contract is with the merchant. If the product is not as warranted, the merchant has to make good with its customer and then seek recourse back to the supplier. A merchant might be able to sometimes disclaim these responsibilities in advance, but in the typical consumer setting, it would be unusual that these disclaimers will have occurred in a manner that would make them effective. The problem is that the consumer is almost always stuck if the merchant refuses to make good because the dollar amounts involved do not justify the lawsuit that would be needed to vindicate the consumer's rights.

This incident reminded me of an experience of my own from a few years back. I had purchased a computer monitor from a local Circuit City store, and it failed within a few weeks. The manager at the Circuit City store refused to exchange the monitor. He agreed the monitor was defective, but insisted that I had to deal with the manufacturer. Knowing that an appeal to legal authority would only worsen my chances of getting satisfaction, I said that a huge advantage of dealing with a bricks-and-mortar location was to have a place to go to when something went wrong and that if Circuit City was not going to stand behind the products it sold there was no reason not to just buy at the lowest price from an online retailer. The store manager could only plead their low profit margins in response. I wonder how that worked out for Circuit City?

Unfortunately, an expectancy of schadenfreude is about all a consumer can hope for in these situations.