Radioshack tries to guilt customers into giving charitable donations...

[Anthony K. S.]

First off, I do beleive that it's likely that every single charge is perfectly valid.

I don't. My definition of valid is thus: The customer freely, under no emotional duress, chose to make a donation.

I could be wrong here, but I think that what Andara meant was that the charges were valid because they only occurred when the customers pressed the buttons indicating that they wanted to make a donation.

As opposed to Radio Shack adding the charges even after the customers pressed the buttons indicating that they didn't want to make a donation.

In the latter case, there is no question that the company is at fault. But in the former case, the company did nothing wrong - the customers were the ones who screwed up.

And they become SCs when they act like the company was at fault, that the company cheated them, or was otherwise doing something shady by charging them the $1 donations when, in reality, the charges occurred solely because of the customers' mistakes.

The donations might not be valid, because they were unintentional, but the charges are perfectly valid.


I find myself reminded of something that I posted on a Planet Feedback letter once.

The letter writer was complaining about Target refusing to make an exception to their clearly stated return policy for him, and he offered up a truly pathetic excuse :

"With so much going on in my life, I didn't have time to study my receipt for terms and conditions for returns."

In other words, he never bothered to take the five seconds it would have taken to look at the back of the receipt to find out that no returns or exchanges would be permitted without a receipt or after a certain time period.

Just like Radio Shack's customers never bothered to take the two seconds it would have taken to actually read the prompt on the screen to find out what exactly they were supposed to do.

In my comment on that PFB letter, I stated :

"The fact that the letter writer never bothered to find out what the return policy was does not alter the fact that he agreed to it when he made the purchase.

You know, if a person signed a legal contract and then tried to get out of it by claiming, 'I didn't read the contract before I signed it,' he would be laughed at."


In real life, you would never be able to say, "I shouldn't have to abide by those terms, because I never read them before I agreed to them" without somebody calling you an idiot.

Only a customer can get away with that level of stupidity.


In my opinion, what we have here is a classic case of "Did they deserve it? Yes, they did deserve it, but you still shouldn't have done it."

If Radio Shack had added the $1 charges regardless of whether the customers agreed to them or not, then, yes, the customers would be perfectly justified in their complaints.

But if, as I now strongly suspect, the customers simply weren't paying attention, or possibly just changed their minds afterward . . . and actually demanded that the company return that one lousy dollar to them rather than have it go to a charity . . .

I feel no sympathy for these customers. None.

I want to make my own position on this clear :

I agree that Radio Shack was wrong to lay a guilt trip on the people who wanted their dollars refunded.

But that does not, in any way, shape, or form, mean that I think that these people didn't deserve to have a guilt trip laid on them for what they did.

It's like if a customer is shouting at and insulting an employee in a retail store (for something that was actually the customer's mistake), and the employee responds in kind, by shouting back at the customer.

The employee shouldn't have done that . . . Not because the customer didn't deserve it. He did deserve it. The employee shouldn't have done it because it's unprofessional and inappropriate for an employee to behave that way.

Yes, the customer deserved it, but the employee still shouldn't have done it.

By the same token :

When Radio Shack's customers acted like the company was at fault for something that was actually the customers' mistakes, and demanded their dollars back, and Radio Shack responded by laying a guilt trip on these customers . . .

Did these people deserve the guilt trip?

Hell, yes, they deserved it.

But Radio Shack still shouldn't have done it.

[Broomjockey]

I could be wrong here, but I think that what Andara meant was that the charges were valid because they only occurred when the customers pressed the buttons indicating that they wanted to make a donation.

You wrote that long post for nothing, because I supplied MY definition of valid. Since the rest of it stems from a definition I'm not using, it's not particularly addressing my point.

[Anthony K. S.]

You wrote that long post for nothing, because I supplied MY definition of valid. Since the rest of it stems from a definition I'm not using, it's not particularly addressing my point.

It wasn't intended to.

I apologize for not making this clear :

Only the first five lines of my post were in response to your post, and then, only to express the opinion that the donations may have been invalid, but the charges themselves were valid, because the company did what the customers instructed them to, whether intentionally or not.

From there, I branched out into talking about the situation in general. It was not intended to respond to anything that you said.

I didn't write it "for nothing" . . . I still stand by everything that I said.