The main circumstances in which the customers could legitimately refuse to return the goods here would be if they had truly and innocently changed their position as a result of the transaction. For example, let’s say I sell you a valuable car by mistake (instead of a clapped out banger) and you innocently sell it on to a third party, or possibly you’re involved in an accident.

What about consumer rights?

One article I saw suggested that at least one customer had tried to defend his/her retention of the products on the basis that they were “unsolicited” and therefore UK legislation meant that customers could keep them (to be precise for legal buffs, we’re talking here about the Unsolicited Goods and Services Act 1971 as amended by the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000.) Basically, that legislation says that if you receive unsolicited goods you can keep them and it may even be a criminal offence for the sender to demand them back.

I was going to leave it at this, but I’ve received tweets asking me about this legislation specifically. So here’s what it (specifically regulation 24(1) which you can read here) says: if (a) “unsolicited goods are sent to a person (“the recipient”) with a view to his acquiring them; (b)the recipient has no reasonable cause to believe that they were sent with a view to their being acquired for the purposes of a business; and (c)the recipient has neither agreed to acquire nor agreed to return them”, then “The recipient may, as between himself and the sender, use, deal with or dispose of the goods as if they were an unconditional gift to him”.

So the Distance Selling Regulations say expressly that if you receive “unsolicited goods” with a view to acquiring them AND you have “no reasonable cause to believe that they were sent with a view to their being acquired” AND you have “neither agreed to acquire nor agreed to return them” then you can keep them as an “unconditional gift”.

But that’s not the situation with Zavvi, I’m afraid. If you receive goods in the mail without ever asking for them, they’re “unsolicited”. If you order something by mail and get it, or even if you get something different than you expected, they are not “unsolicited” and you would have “reasonable cause to believe that they were sent with a view to their being acquired..” The legislation talked about above was originally intended to deal with unscrupulous people in the 1960s and 1970s who would send you unsolicited goods by mail and then demand payment for them by scaring you with threats of legal action. Then it was updated in 2000 to deal with the same tactics in the new online world But Zavvi was engaged in nothing of the sort, from the press reports we’ve seen at least.

The real world answer:

Zavvi was between a rock and a hard place here. On the one hand, they were about to suffer a loss because of what was probably an administrative error and why shouldn’t they seek to reduce that loss? On the other hand, unless this was a mistake involving large numbers of units, would the financial loss involved really be worth the PR mini-storm they have just cooked up? Besides which, why punish loyal customers for an internal error? Sounds like a finely balanced argument to me, to put it mildly.

Regardless though of where one stands on that particular debate, the main point is this: Zavvi were entitled to do what they did as a matter of law. One might not agree with them actually exercising their legal rights here rather than just write the whole thing off as a mistake, but that was their decision to make and they’ll have to answer to their customer base for it.

UPDATE: the BBC has an interesting article on this with some quotes from the UK’s Citizens Advice Bureau and others.