Alright kiddos! It's time for another installment of "What's fair!?" with your host Mike K. We're going to give you a scenario and you're going tell us... You guessed it! What's fair! The person we deem is the most fair wins an all expense paid trip to Elgin, IL. Ready? Here we go!
A customer buys a live streaming switcher from Mike's company for $10,000. The live streaming device is basically a rack mount computer with a bunch of proprietary cards in it. Mike's company tested it and it works well. Mike's company also offers a warranty on it.
Customer receives it and says it's not turning on. That's not good! After going back and forth over what to do the customer ultimately decides to return the device. He has his assistant ship it. His assistant used almost no packing material, packed the items loose in a hard pelican case and didn't insure the package. His assistance packed this...
On top of this....
Things ended predictably bad. The keyboard (control surface) suffered extensive damage and that pretty joystick in the pictures was torn right off as were a bunch of buttons. The actual rack mount computer suffered much worse. The device weighs about 40lbs and it bent in half, slightly though it was indeed in half. Here's a picture of that:
The upside is this all happened about 6 weeks ago and the customer has acknowledged their error and isn't telling us to pound sand. He understands this is going to cost him some coin. The bad news is the manufacturer just returned the unit to us as salvage and said that while they can replace the obviously bad motherboard, they have no idea what's going to be broken beyond that and all of the boards beyond the motherboard are proprietary and expensive. They referred to my $15,000 switcher as salvage. No Bueno.
So here's where we stand:
The control board I was able to fix for $150 and can re-sell to get about $3500 back. That leaves me down $6500 for the rack mount computer itself which is the meat and potatoes of the setup. I don't expect him to eat the $6500, largely because had he received the unit and it functioned in the first place, he never would have had to return it. That's an argument he's mentioned and it's a great point despite the fact that it did work for us. Sometimes things decide not to work at awkward times.
So that said, what's fair? From $10,000 I can sell the control board for $3500 which brings my loss to $6500. From there I can probably get $1000 for the broken rack mount unit which brings my loss to $5500. How much of that $5500 should he be on the hook for and why?
A customer buys a live streaming switcher from Mike's company for $10,000. The live streaming device is basically a rack mount computer with a bunch of proprietary cards in it. Mike's company tested it and it works well. Mike's company also offers a warranty on it.
Customer receives it and says it's not turning on. That's not good! After going back and forth over what to do the customer ultimately decides to return the device. He has his assistant ship it. His assistant used almost no packing material, packed the items loose in a hard pelican case and didn't insure the package. His assistance packed this...
On top of this....
Things ended predictably bad. The keyboard (control surface) suffered extensive damage and that pretty joystick in the pictures was torn right off as were a bunch of buttons. The actual rack mount computer suffered much worse. The device weighs about 40lbs and it bent in half, slightly though it was indeed in half. Here's a picture of that:
The upside is this all happened about 6 weeks ago and the customer has acknowledged their error and isn't telling us to pound sand. He understands this is going to cost him some coin. The bad news is the manufacturer just returned the unit to us as salvage and said that while they can replace the obviously bad motherboard, they have no idea what's going to be broken beyond that and all of the boards beyond the motherboard are proprietary and expensive. They referred to my $15,000 switcher as salvage. No Bueno.
So here's where we stand:
The control board I was able to fix for $150 and can re-sell to get about $3500 back. That leaves me down $6500 for the rack mount computer itself which is the meat and potatoes of the setup. I don't expect him to eat the $6500, largely because had he received the unit and it functioned in the first place, he never would have had to return it. That's an argument he's mentioned and it's a great point despite the fact that it did work for us. Sometimes things decide not to work at awkward times.
So that said, what's fair? From $10,000 I can sell the control board for $3500 which brings my loss to $6500. From there I can probably get $1000 for the broken rack mount unit which brings my loss to $5500. How much of that $5500 should he be on the hook for and why?