Charges filed against Noel Leeming for misrepresenting consumers’ rights

Forums › Off topic › Charges filed against Noel Leeming for misrepresenting consumers’ rights

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#2004601 29-Apr-2018 16:28

pillmonsta:

Suppliers/agents are bound by the CGA for 6mths, tho RTB can be up to one year. That's "reasonable time period".

After that you're covered by the manufacturer & subsequent RMA's are made through the local agent, which in F&P's case is Noel Leeming.

F&P paid for your repairs, not NL. The fact NL are F&P's agents is mere coincidence. NL were also well within their rights to refuse a CGA claim after 1yr. Suppliers cannot be held indefinitely.

This is rich coming from someone who's blatantly making things up. Can you please cite the relevant section of the Consumer Guarantees Act that tells us conclusively that Noel Leemings may refuse a CGA claim after 1 year? And I didn't know that the Disputes Tribunal has ever definitively pronounced on suppliers/agents being bound by the CGA across all goods for 6 months only.

dejadeadnz

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#2004603 29-Apr-2018 16:38

As I've said elsewhere, there are no definitive and "binding in all cases" guidelines to how low one's CGA obligations will last. People can quote internal retailer guidelines all they like but that's not law. Good luck to anyone who wishes to argue in front of the DT that a supplier of a sparsely used laptop no longer has any CGA responsibilities after a year. Pillmonsta, it's really time that you stop pretending to be a lawyer.

LostBoyNZ

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#2004607 29-Apr-2018 16:45

pillmonsta:

Suppliers/agents are bound by the CGA for 6mths, tho RTB can be up to one year. That's "reasonable time period".

After that you're covered by the manufacturer & subsequent RMA's are made through the local agent, which in F&P's case is Noel Leeming.

F&P paid for your repairs, not NL. The fact NL are F&P's agents is mere coincidence. NL were also well within their rights to refuse a CGA claim after 1yr. Suppliers cannot be held indefinitely.

In my 9 years of consumer electronics retail experience I found it's often the retailer that pays for out of warranty repairs. They'll of course try to get the manufacturer to pay first, and that's why it can take a long time to "process" an out of warranty repair. But many times the manufacturer will say no, and the retailer wanting to keep the customer happy or to honour the CGA, will agree to pay. The customer often never knows who paid, unless the store wants to ensure the customer knows they did them a "favour" or something.

The retailer can try and claim their sort of equivalent of the CGA with the manufacturer, but how that goes and the outcome is beyond my knowledge so I couldn't speculate.

Also there's absolutely no set "reasonable time period" defined. Ultimately if you push it far enough, it's actually down to a judge's decision based on what they feel is right and wrong. But rarely will it ever reach that point, companies usually give in before court if you get the high ups attention enough, or at least that's been my experience.

What's a reasonable length is more down to how long do these products normally last. Do fridges normally go faulty after a year? If not, and the fridge has been well looked after by the consumer, then chances are something inside wasn't up to the quality expected, and that shouldn't be the consumers fault.

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#2004608 29-Apr-2018 16:46

pillmonsta:
surfisup1000:

Dial111: To those knocking manufacturers for not recognising the CGA, did you try the retailer you bought these goods off first?

First and foremost that's who your contract is with, start there..

Bagging the manufacturer on a public forum without even giving the full story is just slander in my eyes.

Learn the law, big guy. You make assumptions , jump to incorrect conclusions and throw baseless accusations.

Here are a couple of facts... I bought the lenovo from the NZ online website...they have no local stores or even head office that can be easily contacted. I have no choice but to go through their call center.

With F&P, i went through Noel Leeming, they were refusing to honour the cga and directed me to F&P. F&P call center staff had no idea about the CGA, they said sorry your fridge is out of warranty there is nothing we can do. So , I took noel leeming to disputes, NL called me pre-hearing and agreed to pay for my repairs.

Incidentally, I do expect offshore call centers to understand New Zealand consumer law. Companies cannot ignore their CGA responsibilities by exporting their call centers.

I notice many facts posts recently are based on assumptions, including yours. No wonder so many consumers got shafted by NL.

Whether a a centre is onshore or offshore has nothing to do with CGA. Lenovo's helpdesk could be based on Mars, you'd still be covered..

Call ASUS Auckland 09-xxxxxx and it goes through to Singapore. Call Spark Residential you talk to a CSR in the Philippines

Lenovo, ASUS, HP, Intel, AMD etc all have agents in NZ, and the agent is who you deal with when making an RMA claim.

Suppliers/agents are bound by the CGA for 6mths, tho RTB can be up to one year. That's "reasonable time period".

After that you're covered by the manufacturer & subsequent RMA's are made through the local agent, which in F&P's case is Noel Leeming.

F&P paid for your repairs, not NL. The fact NL are F&P's agents is mere coincidence. NL were also well within their rights to refuse a CGA claim after 1yr. Suppliers cannot be held indefinitely.

Back to Lenovo, if you were to open an RMA ticket the helpesk would direct you to the nearest Lenovo repair centre in NZ.

One agent I know is Cyclone Computers in Auckland, well afaik they are. It's been 12yrs since I left Cyclone but I you could prob call them instead of Lenovo.

A tip for joe public.... 99% of the time it's a lot less hassle to cut out the middleman and go straight to the manufacturer when making claims, in some cases they will refer you back to the agent, (ASUS RMA is PITA).   But calling the manufacturer first, (they all have freephone numbers) can often save a lot frustration easy to find.

Fwiw I have little story to share involving Noel Leeming:

A 5-10 SMB owner with 6 NL leased machines is told to bring two broken units in for warranty/repair work. (NL don't repair anything, least of all OEM units under warranty). So he did - a 60km drive btw.

Two weeks go by & no word so owner calls NL to get an ETA on when the units would be ready. Unsurprisingly, both machines were still sitting out the back of NL's waiting to be shipped to Whangerai (repair centre)

I knew what was wrong the HDD was borked, a 2hr job. But being leased the client (yes -it happened to a client) was obliged to send it in.

Btw for small SMB's - lease machines are bad news, particularly AIO units. Major downtime if anything goes wrong - as illustrated here.

Like TLA’s* much?

Apart from that, I don’t know much about the Consumer Guarantees Act but enough to know that most of what you’ve said Is utter rubbish.

* Three Letter Acronyms

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JimmyH

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#2004615 29-Apr-2018 17:06

LostBoyNZ:

In my 9 years of consumer electronics retail experience I found it's often the retailer that pays for out of warranty repairs. They'll of course try to get the manufacturer to pay first, and that's why it can take a long time to "process" an out of warranty repair. But many times the manufacturer will say no, and the retailer wanting to keep the customer happy or to honour the CGA, will agree to pay. The customer often never knows who paid, unless the store wants to ensure the customer knows they did them a "favour" or something.

The retailer shouldn't "want" to honour the CGA. They have to. Complying with the law isn't optional. Nor is it doing the customer a favour. It's a legal obligation that they should build into their business model, just like all their competitors.

richms

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#2004618 29-Apr-2018 17:12

LostBoyNZ:

In my 9 years of consumer electronics retail experience I found it's often the retailer that pays for out of warranty repairs. They'll of course try to get the manufacturer to pay first, and that's why it can take a long time to "process" an out of warranty repair. But many times the manufacturer will say no, and the retailer wanting to keep the customer happy or to honour the CGA, will agree to pay. The customer often never knows who paid, unless the store wants to ensure the customer knows they did them a "favour" or something.

Providing legally required support on goods you sell for a profit is hardly a "favour" - its the flipside of the dozerns of other sales they make that they have pure profit and no support costs on.

Places that act like doing their obligations is going above and beyond and great service and stuff really annoys me. Its their job, do it and get on with it.

Richard rich.ms

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#2004624 29-Apr-2018 17:23

geek4me:

sbiddle:

I can't say I have any sympathy for Noel Leeming after my poor experiences there. I would never willingly buy anything there again.

I've also noticed as of late how incredibly expensive they are - while researching a few recent purchases for people it was interesting to see how they were so much more expensive even during their sale periods. I noticed looking at TV's on Anzac day for somebody that even with 20% off they were hundreds more than Harvey Norman.

While they are often more than other stores they have for me, so far, always matched a competitor's price and given Fly Buys when shown a competitor's better price online.

Both my recent issues were while attempting price matches. They wouldn't even price match Warehouse Stationary and told me the price there was "too cheap".

The other involved a staff member sighting the price on the website of another major player and flat-out refusing to match it.

I'm not interested in going somewhere and having to negotiate with staff just to get their products down to a reasonable price. The last time I went to JB HiFi to buy headphones the salesman was the happiest guy in the world, took him 10 seconds to look at the Noel Leeming website to verify a price for a price match and laughed when I said I refused to buy anything from Noel Leeming.

I despise aspects of Harvey Norman's business practices as well but have never had a bad experience shopping there. Staff are more than willing to seriously negotiate when it comes to the price.

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surfisup1000

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#2004631 29-Apr-2018 17:46

pillmonsta:

F&P paid for your repairs, not NL. The fact NL are F&P's agents is mere coincidence. NL were also well within their rights to refuse a CGA claim after 1yr. Suppliers cannot be held indefinitely.

Back to Lenovo, if you were to open an RMA ticket the helpesk would direct you to the nearest Lenovo repair centre in NZ.

Could you point to the section in the CGA which supports your claim that NL can refuse CGA claims after 1 year...

http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1993/0091/24.0/DLM311053.html

You are very specific so you must have some source where you obtained this little nugget.

As for my lenovo situation, what you say makes little contextual sense. You imply i should have followed Lenovos default process, which means i'd have had to pay for repairs that should be covered by the CGA.

LostBoyNZ

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#2004719 29-Apr-2018 20:44

JimmyH:

LostBoyNZ:

In my 9 years of consumer electronics retail experience I found it's often the retailer that pays for out of warranty repairs. They'll of course try to get the manufacturer to pay first, and that's why it can take a long time to "process" an out of warranty repair. But many times the manufacturer will say no, and the retailer wanting to keep the customer happy or to honour the CGA, will agree to pay. The customer often never knows who paid, unless the store wants to ensure the customer knows they did them a "favour" or something.

The retailer shouldn't "want" to honour the CGA. They have to. Complying with the law isn't optional. Nor is it doing the customer a favour. It's a legal obligation that they should build into their business model, just like all their competitors.

richms:

LostBoyNZ:

In my 9 years of consumer electronics retail experience I found it's often the retailer that pays for out of warranty repairs. They'll of course try to get the manufacturer to pay first, and that's why it can take a long time to "process" an out of warranty repair. But many times the manufacturer will say no, and the retailer wanting to keep the customer happy or to honour the CGA, will agree to pay. The customer often never knows who paid, unless the store wants to ensure the customer knows they did them a "favour" or something.

Providing legally required support on goods you sell for a profit is hardly a "favour" - its the flipside of the dozerns of other sales they make that they have pure profit and no support costs on.

Places that act like doing their obligations is going above and beyond and great service and stuff really annoys me. Its their job, do it and get on with it.

Sorry yes I should have put "want" in quotes like I did "favour", and explain in further. That's from the retailers point of view, so I put quote marks around things. I completely agree, complying with the law isn't optional, and to be honest our branch was thankfully great with that, myself included. But it's the sad truth that retailers' head offices and area managers (because of the pressure from their bosses), don't want to comply with the CGA if they don't have to. Having it as a law doesn't mean they "have" to if most consumers don't know about it or call stores out on it. I know they have to by the law, but that's different to what really happens. The simple reason is because it costs them more money to comply with it than it does to try their best to ignore it and confuse consumers, and it also eats away at their extended warranty programs which they have a lot of money invested in. There's really significant profit in those warranties, if they hit targets.

Usually they push those extended warranties with very specific targets for sales people to meet, which I absolutely didn't approve of. In fact I made a long post about those targets years ago to make those details public, and thankfully Mauricio was good enough to hide my identity when the company in question wanted to know who leaked those details. Cheers Mauricio!

Because all the pressure that comes down from the top, ends up on sales people, and they put that pressure on the staff. I can't speak for all companies but it can be common to say if you don't hit your warranty target you get no commission. And honestly it can be the difference of a few hundred dollars a week, or much more or less depending on the company and the employee. It's usually the difference between minimum or near-minimum wage, and a fair number of dollars more.

I agree that they should build the CGA into their business model, but head office really only care about the money. They always have to be pushed to comply with the CGA, retail staff rarely ever willingly inform the customer of their rights and such without the customer bringing it up first. That's certainly not the case with every single retail store and staff member, but sadly it's by far the majority.

The single best things that can happen to the CGA is to educate consumers, and punish retailers. It has to cost businesses more money to act like this than it does to fully and truly comply with the CGA and do whats right for the consumer. And at present that's certainly not the case.

Every time there's a TV special on them, extended warranty hit rates drop by a large margin. But they quickly bounce back. The same thing that happened when the latest law changes came into effect. For a few months suddenly you'd never hear head office or an area manager speak of extended warranties... but slowly are surely... the pressure came back.

I have a friend who had to take JB Hi-Fi to small claims court over a laptop, and I know of many other stories. I think it's incredibly bad how retailers treat customers, and how retailers see customers.

To end on though, NZ'ers actually do have it pretty good when it comes to our CGA and just dealing with faulty products in general. Certainly not as good as some countries, but certainly better than many countries where consumers cannot go back to a store with a faulty product, they go to the manufacturers, there's no CGA and such. We've still got far to go, and I really believe this needs to cost retailers far more than what it currently does to bring about those changes...

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raytaylor

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#2004744 29-Apr-2018 21:41

I recently got an expensive samsung phone - broke the screen after 2 weeks.

Bought another one, got the insurance policy and I have to say they seem to be providing fair and reasonable information with the product.

Should also be noted that the american woman whats her name Erin Brockovich - she started being their spokeswoman a few years ago. Then she got upset about Bond+Bond advertising being a little sexist and after another month she left saying Noels were not treating their customers fairly.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/26044/Brockovich-nixes-sexist-whiteware-ads

https://i.imgur.com/FwViuBT.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/1G8rEIE.jpg

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quickymart

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#2004771 29-Apr-2018 22:24

LOL every time I hear that name, I think:

Marge: That company's ruining the whole town's health, and I don't know how to stop them.

Lisa: Why don't you file a class-action suit?

Marge: Oh, yeah, like Erin Brockovich.

Bart: The prostitute with a heart of gold.

dejadeadnz

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#2004792 29-Apr-2018 23:46

Here's my final anti-nonsense contribution of the day. Section 7(1) of the Consumer Guarantees Act reads as follows:

Meaning of acceptable quality

(1) For the purposes of section 6, goods are of acceptable quality if they are as—

(a) fit for all the purposes for which goods of the type in question are commonly supplied; and

(b) acceptable in appearance and finish; and

(c) free from minor defects; and

(d)safe; and

(e) durable,—

as a reasonable consumer fully acquainted with the state and condition of the goods, including any hidden defects, would regard as acceptable, having regard to—

(f) the nature of the goods:

(g) the price (where relevant):

(h) any statements made about the goods on any packaging or label on the goods:

(ha) the nature of the supplier and the context in which the supplier supplies the goods:

(i) any representation made about the goods by the supplier or the manufacturer:

(j)all other relevant circumstances of the supply of the goods.

People, you can have your opinions but not your facts. Nothing in the statute supports Pillmonsta's nonsensical claim that:

Suppliers/agents are bound by the CGA for 6mths, tho RTB can be up to one year. That's "reasonable time period".

After that you're covered by the manufacturer & subsequent RMA's are made through the local agent, which in F&P's case is Noel Leeming.

F&P paid for your repairs, not NL. The fact NL are F&P's agents is mere coincidence. NL were also well within their rights to refuse a CGA claim after 1yr. Suppliers cannot be held indefinitely.

This when s 18 of the CGA gives a consumer various well-known options against a supplier and s 27 providing similar remedies against a supplier for failure of the goods to meet acceptable quality. You listen to Pillmonsta's nonsense at your peril.

michaelmurfy

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#2004815 30-Apr-2018 07:37

Well one guy is no-longer among us for telling people to "bugger off" to put it nicely along with what seems to be blatantly trolling. No need to argue this - the CGA is clear, and online, and has been posted here multiple times so no need to argue about it as there are plenty of threads here of people doing just that. So guys, be nice to one another. There is no need to argue this.

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quickymart

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#2004816 30-Apr-2018 07:41

Pillmonsta? Dial111? Sorry I think I missed something between last night and this morning...

dejadeadnz

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#2004823 30-Apr-2018 07:47

quickymart: Pillmonsta? Dial111? Sorry I think I missed something between last night and this morning...

You did but in context the right outcome was reached to start with a clean slate and leave this thread without the stain of someone's obvious trolling and the (then) necessary replies to help detox the thread.

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