Vendor Beware

I go to the Canadian Superstore here and, lured by the near-register positioning and glaringly cheap sale price, I decide to spontaneously add to my purchases a box of seedless mandarin oranges (5 lbs; $3.59). Well satisfied after calculating less than a buck a pound for citrus, I merrily go home, open the box, unwrap one, and find a half-green, half-orange, mottled monstrosity that in better, unmodified times; in the recesses of genetic botanical history, might have been a mandarin. Poor and outraged, I return to the store box of mandarins in hand (exposed greenie placed back), and ask for a refund at the service customer desk. I am denied. My expression undoubtedly kindled into a startled look by indignation, I ask to speak to the manager, who promptly appears after his name echoes from a loudspeaker the chagrined service customer lady has deigned to use. I lodge my complaint. He, with a phoney look of incomprehension listens; then a smug glint steals into his eyes and he says, "Sir, caveat emptor. Buyer beware." A point of muddled common law, I understand. I ask him for whom laws are made. The smugness is replaced by a slight cloud. He mumbles out a "for everyone." I agree. I ask him, feeling hot and annoyed at the hypocrisies of consumerism, if he thinks, asking any single person in here--the market was teeming with people; must have been hundreds--whether or not any of them would agree that I should get a refund. Duh, stutter, "I'd have to ask them." Then let's, I suggest. The cloud becomes rattish alertness and he's really uncomfortable. Marshalling his confidence with a bright notion, he turns the tables: "what is your point, sir?" My point, I return, is that if the laws are created for everyone, and if everyone in this store would agree that I should have a refund, then the law must be revised to reflect the will of everyone. Everyone would say, "vendor, you're wrong." I could see he wondered if someone with a baton and sociopathic tendencies should be called in to deal with me. Something, I imagine, in my own eyes suggests that I'd get a swipe at him at least before something removed me. He decides, turns to the customer service lady, and tells her, brusquely, to return my money. He then vanishes.

If you're deceived, and you know it, you know there's no misunderstanding or genuine error on the part of the seller; if they're concealing a product and then selling it very cheaply, not suggesting via exposure of the product just why, it's in plain english a scam. Encountering one, say so, complain loudly, force the lie that laws are designed to help and protect the masses to the fore. Under the light of a few honest direct questions and the unwillingness to feel intimidated by the immanence of physical threat, you might get some justice. True justice would have included an apology and something free, for the time and frustration I experienced. But some measure, scrabbled for, leads to another.