No, you are not taking the moral high ground by calling Nintendo customer service and initiating a back-and-forth on what to do with the mistakenly-delivered extra product. In fact, you are probably costing Nintendo more money than the second Switch is worth by doing so.
There is no reason, ever, unless the cost of the item is extremely high, to initiate a conversation with customer service when you are mistakenly delivered extra goods. The company will take inventory and notice that that it was mistakenly sent. If they don't contact you about it, it's because they want you to keep it because a cost-benefit analysis on their part does not warrant getting in contact with you over it.
A switch costs 330,- Dollar; The support person is getting paid anyway. Shipping costs 8 Dollar. Yes it matters.
Yes it matters in one case, yes it matters in 10 cases.
Yes you have a ethical/moral responsibility to tell them. Why? Because if you expect any company or someone else to tell you when you fucked up, you have to do this as well.
I go back to a store to tell them, that they forgot to give me 1$. I go back to a store and give them 1$ when i realise that they gave me 1$ more than expected.
No, they didn't "[cost] Nintendo more money than the second Switch is worth". Nintendo could just have said, "Keep it" and only been out the cost of a support call, which is necessarily less than the cost of a Switch.
Nintendo is the one in the wrong here.
The customer wouldn't have been wrong to do nothing and keep it, but calling them and admitting the mistake is definitely the moral high-road here. It may not be the smartest thing, but that's different.
I disagree, there's no code about this that everyone knows about. I think he did the right thing by contacting them. They did the wrong thing, obviously they should just let him keep it but some cheapskate customer service rep decided 'no we must have this thing back' and ridiculously decided threatening legal action was a good idea.
But I've heard of people contacting support for a vendor to hear "thanks for letting us know, you can keep the item" which should have probably been Nintendo's stance in this issue
I'm in the "if they want it back, they will contact you and ask" mindset --- it's entirely their mistake, to correct at their expense, and you shouldn't have to do anything about it.
I really had no idea how much the actual "unit cost" of a call to customer service was until I worked on a consumer-facing app for a company that also had a large call center. One of our metrics of how well our app worked was how many call center interactions were avoided because customers could use self-service options in the app. Anytime someone called, the average effective cost to us was on the order of tens of dollars.
This is doubly true when it comes to this threat of suing you for mistakenly receiving the second device, notwithstanding the customer support costs leading up to this.
A Switch is definitely worth less than the cost of having an attorney prepare even the initial legal complaint against you, let alone setting foot into court.
> A Switch is definitely worth less than the cost of having an attorney prepare even the initial legal complaint against you, let alone setting foot into court.
Small claims will be submitted to a collection agency, which will handle the legal posturing in a fully automated manner, i.e. Nintendo sells the claim for, say, 20 per cent of expected return and has nothing to do with it any more, ever (since the collection agency basically gives up if the debtor contests the claim, so they take a calculated risk that at least one fifth of claims will be paid uncontested).
>There is no reason, ever, unless the cost of the item is extremely high, to initiate a conversation with customer service when you are mistakenly delivered extra goods.
Why does it suddenly matter if the cost was arbitrarily high?
He received something he hadn't paid for in error. Seems like the decent thing to do is at least make an attempt to correct the issue. Maybe the error-sent package was meant for someone else. Maybe they say don't worry about it.
But to make an attempt is dumb, and you deserve the thing sent in error? Good grief.
What if someone erroneously deposits $1000 into your bank account? Is that yours to keep? Is it dumb to try to rectify the situation?
So you need to keep the package around for months until eventually they notice it missing and track it down, just to make sure if you will need to send it back or not? Doesn't sound very practical to me... and if you don't let them know they could even take a legal action against you, as it can be characterized as you attempt to conceal the fact and keep their property.
No, you are not taking the moral high ground by calling Nintendo customer service and initiating a back-and-forth on what to do with the mistakenly-delivered extra product. In fact, you are probably costing Nintendo more money than the second Switch is worth by doing so.
There is no reason, ever, unless the cost of the item is extremely high, to initiate a conversation with customer service when you are mistakenly delivered extra goods. The company will take inventory and notice that that it was mistakenly sent. If they don't contact you about it, it's because they want you to keep it because a cost-benefit analysis on their part does not warrant getting in contact with you over it.