I went into Gamestation today and to my surprise they had a few Wiis left.
I was tempted to buy one and enquired. They informed me that I could only purchase the wii as a bundle (ie buy 3 games with it).
Surely this is an illegal practice?
And if not - why not?
RRP's of products are set by the manufacturer but dont think there is anything stopping companies pricing up products any way they want ...
It's not pricing it up though, is it?
Imagine going to buy a bottle of milk and being told "you can't buy that unless you buy a loaf of bread and the sun".
Not right is it?
Again i would have thought a shop can bundle things anyway they want to as well - if people are so desperate for a Wii some mug will pay for it regardless. I have a Wii and never use it - dont believe the hype !!!
If they have an individual Wii price and one available then you should be able to walk away with one, without purchasing the bundle.
Go back and tell them its a simple process:
1) Thats the price
2) Here's my money
3) Pass my Wii
4) Ciao
.: Rishi :.
Because its basic supply and demand.
Think of it this way, there are 100 people who want Wiis, but only 30 to go round.
How do you tell the fairest way of dividing out the Wiis?
The simplest way is too see who wants it the most, or how much money they are willing to spend.
As such this is a perfectly legal practice, more over its perfectly moral and is what makes the world go round. (or in the classic story, why the Communist Russian General couldn't understand how there was no one person who was doing such a good job of keeping london supplied with bread!)
throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)
Not so.Originally Posted by Rishi
Think of it as an invitation to treat, not a contract.
You can buy chrisps in a multipack, or singally. There is no reason they would have to open multipack chrisps to sell you the singular ones if they ran out of those is there? In fact its often forbidden.
throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)
It's not illegal as they can choose how they sell it, if they're selling it as a bundle then that's how you buy it.
Imagine you go to Tesco after a packet of Jaffa cakes, all you can find is a special offer pack of 5, but you only want 1 pack and they have no single packs in stock. You either have the choice to buy the 5 pack or none at all (or to ask the manager to split the pack and sell you one pack, which s/he has the choice of doing or not).
D'oh! I take too long typing these things out and you whipper-snappers get in there saying the same thing as I'm typing. BTW, to be fair it doesn't have to be Tesco could be any of those there supermarkets.
Last edited by med2003; 07-12-2007 at 03:15 PM. Reason: Too sloooooow
Perfect combo right there
I think it's a bit heavy to be going into moral arguments for everything under the sun! The OP was asking about legality.
As far as I can tell, it is legal as long as there is scope in their retailer contract with Nintendo for them to do that. It could even be that they only obtained the systems from Nintendo on the proviso it was sold as a bundle (very unlikely, but possible).
Sometimes there are also company directives that control this sort of thing - I remember some kind of storm in the US over bundles of the X360 - it might be worth researching them and seeing what the precidence was over there, even if it might not be applicable over here.
I don't think it's illegal per se, unless you could prove that the inflated prices were a product of pricing fixing rather than market forces.
Bloody annoying though, I'll give you that!
It's legal (I worked at GAME for 4 years and we had various people telling is what we could and couldn't sell)
One bloke was so adamant he was correct we let him use our phone to call trading standards.....who promptly told him the same thing.
No one is forcing people to buy it at that price, its just supply and demand.
Don't get me wrong, I hate the practice. Its unfair on those with a lower income who just want the machine + game, but its certainly not illegal.
Edit - If you could prove price fixing between retailers - thats an entirely different thing. But as it stands, its just supply<demand = markup.
If you ran a business and had something in short supply with loads of people wanting it, would you mark it up? I know I would
Read the first line of my post, if they have them for sale as individual packs with a single unit price then they cannot force you to buy a multipack.
Say you went to the supermarket and you wanted a pack of crisps, they sold them and had them in stock, but you werent allowed to buy them, if you wanted these crisps then you would have to buy a multipack. Do you see my point of view?
.: Rishi :.
I can't believe these are selling out for a second xmas... they're such a novelty item.
Anyway.. most shops bundles are under different product codes so i'd imagine they have to sell them as those product codes and whatever that includes.. Might be wrong.
Essentially would it not come down to this:
If it is sold/advertised as a bundle you cannot remove the Wii as a single item and buy it that way.
.: Rishi :.
Right
1) It's not a novelty gift - I've had one since launch and it's great (Mario Galaxay ftw!)
2) It's not a bundle is it? It's nor packaged as one, nor is it meant to be so the multipack of crisps argument is rubbish.
It's like going into a supermarket seeing a packet of crisps and THEN an assistant saying, "you want it - it's part of a bundle of 5"
I'm not too fussed, as I have one, but I'd be shocked if it was legal - that's dodgy as!
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