It is the year 2011. Specifically May 2011. Rockstar’s latest opus, LA Noire is released to the UK and rave reviews on 20th May 2011. This poor blogger hadn’t pre-ordered it though, because well, money’s a bit tight at the moment. Instead, I was holding out for a decent deal or for LoveFilm to send me a rental copy of the game, whichever happened first.
On 21st May, the former seemed to happen though. At 10am on the dot, while doing my usual early morning (well, early for me) arsing about on the internet, I received an email newsletter from HMV. You can see it here (linked rather than embedded as it’s rather large).
“Huzzah,” thought I. “LA Noire for £34.99 with a 20% off code means I could get it for just £28. That’s a pretty decent price.” So I dutifully clicked through that link to HMV’s webstore to buy it.
Except it wasn’t available for £34.99, but rather £39.99. Now, does that make a difference? Well yes, £4 difference. Not a lot perhaps, but enough to gall. Besides, if it’s advertised at £34.99, they should be selling it for £39.99. I rooted around HMV’s site for a little bit, trying to see if the price was different between formats (it wasn’t) or if I had to go a certain page for it (long shot and wrong), but alas I could find nothing to get it at that advertised price.
So I emailed HMV customer services about it. Writing at 11:41
Hi,
I just got your regular email newsletter advertising your pick of new items. In the email, LA Noire is advertised as £34.99, but following the link to your website, it’s only available at £39.99. Shouldn’t these match up? Which is the correct price?Martin S Smith
Polite, well-written and to the point, yes? Anyway, I left it at that, went about my life, hoping they’d get back to me before the 20% code expired. I assumed I’d at least hear back either way that day.
Skip along to the morning of Monday 23rd May. The code had expired (well, I thought it had, actually it didn’t expire until that evening, but that turns out to be moot) and I’d pretty much forgotten about the whole thing. But at 10:11 I finally got a reply.
Dear Martin Smith,
Thank you for contacting hmv regarding the price of ‘LA Noire’. I appreciate the chance to assist you today.
We apologise for the confusion. Please be informed that both price are correct. The ‘LA Noire £39.99 is an interactive game means you can access it through internet. The other ‘LA Noire’ £34.99 is a pre played game means it was a pre owned item but in a good condition.
If you need more assistance, do not hesitate to reply to this e-mail or visit our website www.hmv.com.
Thank you for contacting us and we appreciate your patience.
Kind regards,
Jxx Cxx
Online Customer Service Team
Yeah, just let that sink in for a moment. Let your brain try and digest the nonsense that is that reply. Ready? Ok, so let’s address everything wrong with that email.
Thank you for contacting hmv regarding the price of ‘LA Noire’. I appreciate the chance to assist you today.
That’s an utterly odd phrase. But anyway.
We apologise for the confusion. Please be informed that both price are correct. The ‘LA Noire £39.99 is an interactive game means you can access it through internet.
This is complete rubbish. For a start, the sentence doesn’t really make sense. It almost means something, but actually doesn’t at all.
The other ‘LA Noire’ £34.99 is a pre played game means it was a pre owned item but in a good condition.
Good they explained that, because I wouldn’t have known what “pre-played” meant if they hadn’t explained it with “pre-owned”.
Despite the abhorrent grammar and the fact that it barely makes sense, I got what they were suggesting. That LA Noire’s price is £39.99 and that £34.99 is how much they charge for a pre-owned copy of the game and though they didn’t explicitly say it, they were implying I had mixed these up. Which is fine, I suppose, except…
Except, there’s no mention of pre-owned games in the newsletter, let alone that the LA Noire price is for a pre-owned game. Which is probably because HMV don’t sell pre-owned games on their website. And it can’t have been to advertise pre-owned copies in their High Street stores, because as the original newsletter states in the small print:
All prices on hmv.com are online only and may differ from HMV Stores.
So bearing this all in mind, I replied later that morning.
Hi,
I’m sorry, but your reply doesn’t make much sense. You’re saying that £34.99 is the price for a pre-owned copy of LA Noire, but your pre-owned game service isn’t at all mentioned in your newsletter. Furthermore, you don’t even sell pre-owned games on your website, only in-store. And it would be redundant of you to advertise the price of said pre-owned games only available in-store through your website’s newsletter given that the disclaimer at the bottom states: “All prices on hmv.com are online only and may differ from HMV Stores.”
So if it was, in fact, your intention to advertise the price of your pre-owned copies of LA Noire, it’s astoundingly misleading. The newsletter suggests I can purchase LA Noire at a price of £34.99 from your website, when in fact that’s entirely impossible. False advertising like this is disgraceful.Martin S Smith
After sending that, I went and did what anyone annoyed with something does these days – I went and moaned on the internet. I off-handedly suggested that I should report it to the Advertising Standards Authority, not really thinking I would. But a far wiser poster on the message board I moaned on said that I should, because that’s what it’s there for and consumers should make use of it.
So around midday 23rd May I lodged a complaint with the ASA, explaining all this (more succinctly than this article, obviously) and including a copy of the newsletter.
It turned out HMV were interested in the newsletter as well, emailing me at 16:04:
Dear Martin Smith,
Thank you for your reply.
Kindly send the a scanned copy of news letter that you received regarding the price of ‘LA Noire’ so we can further investigate.
We look forward to your reply.
Kind regards,
Jxxx Cxxx
Online Customer Service Team
I replied within a couple of minutes with a composite screenshot of the newsletter and got was assured half an hour later:
Dear Martin Smith,
Thank you for the screen shot that you provided.
I will forward this to our relevant department so we can further investigate.
Thank you for contacting us.
Kind regards,
Jxxx Cxxx
Online Customer Service Team
And I didn’t hear from HMV again for a while.
But in the mean time, the ASA were taking my complaint seriously. Now, the emails and letters I’ve received from the ASA are actually marked confidential, so I will summarise briefly (and it’s mentioned on the ASA’s site, so it can’t be that confidential).
The ASA agreed to look into my complaint and decided that HMV should get an informal rap on the knuckles and a “we’ve got an eye you” warning. Further, they decided that HMV could informally resolve the matter with me and asked if they could they pass on my contact details.
The contacts details HMV should already have had from when I first complained, yeah? I was wary of this, because I didn’t want to follow this option and just get fobbed off with another lame excuse and have that preclude any proper reprimand. But I was assured it wouldn’t be instead of the ASA dealing with HMV. So I agreed. This was all in June and the month ended with me being assured that HMV should be in contact with me “shortly”.
Meanwhile, LoveFilm, wonderful people that they are, had sent me a rental copy of LA Noire and I was deep into it. (Fitting really that the game is based around discerning when people are lying and knowing when and how to doubt it or prove them wrong with evidence). Getting the game from HMV for the price they’d originally offered was moot, as I was happy to just rent it and if I did want to buy it, I could have gotten it cheaper from other retailers by now anyway.
Remember I said I didn’t hear from HMV again for a while? Well it wasn’t until 5th July they bothered to get back to me.
Dear Mr Smith
I am writing in response to your recent communication regarding the price error included in an email to you advertising ‘L.A. Noire’ priced at £34.99.
Stretching the definition of ‘recent’ a bit there, I think. It’d been over a month.
I would like to offer my sincerest apologies for this misunderstanding. At the time that our email was sent to you the price of ‘L.A. Noire’ was £34.99. The price of the item was increased to £39.99 by our supplier between the date that our email was sent to you and the date that you clicked on the link, which is what led to the price disparity that you have noticed.
If you’re wondering why I was a bit anal with times and dates earlier on, this is why. I received the email at 10:00 am exactly and read it immediately, of this I am certain. It can’t have been more than five minutes before I followed the link to their site. So apparently the price changed in that five minutes? That’s either bollocks or ridiculous.
Of course, I appreciate that this was no fault of your own.
Get used to this sort of phrasing.
I would also like to apologise for the lack of response to your email of the 23rd May 2011. Your email should have been escalated to one of the Online Customer Service Department here, at Head Office for further investigation. However, it appears that due to a clerical error your email was misplaced. I would like to assure you that it is extremely rare for a customer email to go missing, but I do appreciate how this has exacerbated the situation on this occasion.
We are of course, happy to offer you ‘L.A. Noire’ at the advertised price of £34.99, if you would still like to place the order.
In a word; “no”. I checked, LA Noire was a little over £32 on Amazon when this was sent.
If you would like us to arrange this, please reply to this email with the last four digits of the card that you would like to use for payment and we will arrange the order with the altered price on your behalf. Alternatively, we are happy to place £5.00 of credit in your hmv.com account which can be spent on anything available on hmv.com.
A £5 voucher. Now, that might seem generous, but really, a £5 discount at HMV usually just brings something down to a normal shop’s price.
I thank you for bringing this error to our attention and I do hope that you will forgive us for the delay in our response to you. I do hope that you have not been discouraged from shopping with hmv.com in future.
Ahaha
Yours sincerely
Zxxx Exxx
store customer service advisor
Just as I’d feared when the ASA said HMV wanted to informally resolved this with me, I was being fed more nonsense. Though they didn’t say it explicitly, they’re implying that I didn’t follow the link in the email quick enough to get the advertised price before it got updated to match the supplier’s price. Which is bollocks. As I said, I received, read and followed the link in the email all within about five minutes. Advertising a price that’s invalid five minutes after the ad is sent is both ridiculous and possibly illegal. What further rubbishes this excuse is that the email was sent on a Saturday morning. I find it hard to believe that they’d be updating prices on a Saturday morning, especially given it took two days for anyone to reply to my email that weekend, or that the supplier would update their catalogue prices on a weekend.
Needless to say, I wasn’t happy. A bullshit excuse that’s really suggesting it was more my fault than anything else and a £5 voucher to buy me off.
Hi Zxxx,
While I appreciate your attempts to deal with my complaint, no doubt due in part to the action I took through the ASA about the misleading email in question, I do have a couple of problems with your email.
Name-dropping the ASA just to make sure they knew I was the same person making a complaint and to remind them that an official body had found them at fault.
First of all, your statement that the supplier’s price for LA Noire changed between the time you sent the email and the time I received it and followed its link is, unfortunately, preposterous. The email was sent to me at 10am. I read it and travelled to your website from it within a couple of minutes of receiving it, five at best. Of this I am absolutely certain as my WebMail Notifier immediately notified me of the email and I read it immediately. The notion that your supplier can change their price and that that change can be reflected in your prices on your website within five minutes is, I feel, tremendously unlikely.
Notice that I’m polite and say ‘tremendously unlikely’ rather than ‘complete bollocks’
And then there’s a bit where I recap my previous correspondence with the other HMV person, because I misread Zxxx’s email and mistakenly thought they didn’t know about all the previous ones. I’m not going to reproduce that bit, simply to face some space. Shut up, yes that’s the only reason.
As to your kind offer to sell me the LA Noire product for the actual advertised price of £34.99, I can only assume you’re joking. It’s been over a month! Even if I hadn’t already purchased it elsewhere, I could go and order it on Amazon right now for less than the altered price you’re offering me (£32.97 if you’re interested). If I’m honest, the main attraction I had to ordering the item from you at £34.99 in the first place was to use it in conjunction with the limited time 20% off code in the same email, but it took your company so long to get back to me that even if that first response had made me this same conciliatory offer, the code still would have expired and been of no use.
As for being discouraged from shopping with your company again, who can say? All I know is that a £5 discount on anything I’m actually interested in buying from you now would only bring the price down to that offered by other, more reliable, retailers, if that.
Yes, this is me angling for a bigger amount. I figure if they’re going to try and buy me off with a voucher, it might as well be for a decent amount.
Yours faithfully,
Martin S Smith
The next day, I got a shorter response.
Dear Mr Smith
Thank you for your response to my email.
I do appreciate your comments regarding the length of time since the release of this game and it’s subsequent price reduction at many retailers and the additional 20% discount you wished to obtain. Therefore, I would like to offer to place £15.00 of credit in your hmv.com e-wallet by way of an apology for the confusion surrounding this issue.
Again, I apologise for the confusion surrounding your initial enquiry and emails and any inconvenience caused.
Yours sincerely
Zxxx Exxx
store customer service advisor
I can put this email rather more succinctly: “Ok, here’s £15, shut up and go away.”
£15’s not a terrible amount to be bought off with I suppose (and I was surprised that they went up that easily), but trouble is I didn’t really care about the money. Even £15 on HMV doesn’t really get you much, compared to say, anywhere else on the internet. But the main thing is I still hadn’t had a proper admission of guilt from HMV. Sure, they’d ‘apologised’ a lot, but never for having made a pricing mistake. The complete omission of talking about the core issue in this latest email confirmed they were sticking with the price update explanation. As they see it, they hadn’t made any mistake. Every time they’d ‘apologised’ it was for me having (supposedly) made a mistake/being confused/not having understood them properly or for them not emailing me promptly. Look:
I apologise for the confusion surrounding your initial enquiry
an apology for the confusion surrounding this issue.
I do hope that you will forgive us for the delay in our response to you.
I would also like to apologise for the lack of response
I would like to offer my sincerest apologies for this misunderstanding.
We apologise for the confusion.
I was sick of them apologising for the confusion instead of actually owning up to making a mistake. Which I told them, also on 6th July.
Dear Zxxx,
Thank you for your prompt reply. Your revised monetary apology is somewhat generous (though is still in a losing battle against your company’s uncompetitive prices).
*cough* Well if they could treble the £5 so easily, why not try? I can be bought apparently, just for above £15.
I’m finding it rather annoying however that, although I’ve received a litany of hollow apologies from your company, you’ve yet to actually take any blame for this mistake. Continually you and your colleagues have offered nonsensical explanations that attribute any mistake and confusion in this matter onto me, which is, frankly, insulting.
The first excuse I received suggested that I had mixed up the pre-owned and normal retail prices for the product, which I quite comprehensively proved to be nonsense. Now you appear to be sticking with this claim that a change in the supplier’s price for the product resulted in your price changing between when the email was sent and when I followed its link, again suggesting it’s my fault for not having read your newsletter quickly enough. I read and followed the link in it within five minutes of it being sent. Either the price had been changed before you sent the newsletter (in which case the newsletter should have been verified before it was sent) and, you knowingly or not, were advertising an incorrect price (as the Advertising Standards Authority have also interpreted) or the price was updated within those five minutes, which given that it was a Saturday morning and you took 48 hours to answer a simple customer email seems especially unlikely.
I want you to admit that you made a mistake! All I’ve had from your company are feeble and patronising excuses that sidestep any culpability on your part and continually try and paint this as a mistake I’ve somehow made, however much you dress it up with empty phrases about ‘confusion’ and ‘apologies’. The only mistake I’ve made in this whole debacle is believing I could get a product for a decent price from HMV.
Yours sincerely,
Martin S Smith
Given the decent response times I was getting with this second customer service rep, I had expected a prompt reply to this, but I didn’t hear anything again for a week. The afternoon of the 13th July;
Dear Mr Smith
Thank you for your email.
I am sorry that you are disappointed with my last response to you and I would like to apologise for the delay in my response to you whilst I was investigating this issue further. However, I hope that in clarifying the contents of my email, I can go some way to restoring your faith in hmv.
Faith in HMV? Fat chance, but ok.
We have investigated this matter internally and I can confirm that this issue was not caused by any confusion or error on your part regarding the Re/Play and full price of this item.
Yes, this I already knew.
Our investigation shows that the email was sent on 16th April 2011 and the price for LA Noire was £34.99 for pre-orders placed before the release of the game on the 20th May 2011.
A change in the story again then. Now, the price still presumably changed because of the supplier, but the email was sent long before I got it! Note the mention of pre-orders here. I’ll address that in a moment.
I must assume that there was a one-off computer glitch in this instance that led to the delay between the email being sent by us and being received by you,
Not entirely implausible, I’ll admit. But I’ve never had a problem with delayed mail to my gmail account any other time and there are problems though, which again I’ll get to in a minute.
as we have not received any similar complaints regarding this issue.
“It must be a problem on your end, because no-one else has complained!” I don’t think anyone else would have cared much if they noticed. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t.
However, the IT Team for the website has been notified to ensure another issue of this nature does not occur again.
Again, I would like to offer our apologies for any inconvenience that this issue may have caused you and for our confusion when addressing this matter.
Well at least they’re apologising for their own confusion this time.
I have arranged for your online account to be credited with £15.00 as promised and I do hope that you will find this a satisfactory resolution to this matter.
Translated: “Look, you’re not getting a bigger amount, so stop angling for it. We’re putting the money in your account whether you want it or not, now go away!”
Yours sincerely
Zxxx Exxx
store customer service advisor
I was very tempted to let this be an end of it. To take the money, pay over the odds for a Doctor Who DVD and forget about it. Except, they’re still peddling crap.
Suppose this email was meant to be sent on the 16th May and was offering the pre-order price for LA Noire. Then why does it say LA Noire is ‘out now’? Why doesn’t it have, like with every other pre-order product in the newsletter, a release date under it? Why on Earth would a company send out an email on a Monday claiming a game that’s not available until the Friday is ‘out now’?
Furthermore, why would they advertise a 20% off code five days before it’s active, without any notification of it not yet being active. If a company emails you a discount code, it’s always currently active unless otherwise stated, but there are no dates given here. Online terms and conditions for the code give its time period as Friday 20th May to Monday 23rd May. If this email had been sent and received on Monday 16th, it would have been equally misleading for the voucher not to be working for another four days without any clear indication of this.
This is all either more bullshit or continual corporate incompetent. I’ve almost given trying to work out which.
So I’m not going to let them browbeat me into submission.
Hi Zxxx
I appreciate the lengths you’ve gone to in investigating this matter. I must say though, this latest explanation has as many holes as all the others.
LA Noire was released to retail on 20th May. If this email was to be sent out on the 16th May, then surely the game’s release date would have been placed between the cover image and the link, as for all the other pre-order items in the email? Instead, it quite clearly says ‘out now’. This not only suggests that the email was created, or at least intended for distribution on, the day I received it (ie after the game’s release), but that if it had been sent on the 16th it would have been erroneously saying the game was out before it actually was.
So your company either planned to send an email saying a game was out days before it was but it conveniently got held up by a ‘glitch’ to the point that misleading statement became correct or the date I received the email was the date you actually intended to send it but you advertised the wrong price and still won’t admit it.
Yours wearily,
Martin S Smith
Yes, I forgot to mention the thing about the voucher code in that email. Next time, I guess.
Updates if/when they come.
