Imagine you get a delivery to your house that you weren’t expecting. Not only is it something you didn’t order, but it’s a very expensive something — almost $40,000 worth of Chanel purses from Neiman Marcus. What would you do?
If you’re the guy this actually happened to, you would return this wealth of overpriced accessories to the local Neiman Marcus, much to the confusion of employees.
Writing on Instagram, an honest person named Matt Hwang explains his story:
Last friday, Neiman Marcus accidentally shipped me $39,168 worth of merchandise. I returned it yesterday morning with their employees looking at me as if I was crazy. Moral of the story – never do the right thing.
Maria Malkias of the Dallas Morning News, Neiman Marcus’s hometown newspaper, notes that the company has had serious issues while switching to a new inventory system, which have led to lost sales of as much as $65 million across the company’s various brands. Maybe this random shipment is a fluke occurrence, maybe not: It definitely would help explain those losses.
Consumerist readers have had similar experiences in the past, though usually the excess items are duplicates of items that they already ordered. A reader was supposed to receive one iPad as a gift, and instead received a case of five when someone likely slapped the shipping label on the wrong box at a Best Buy warehouse.
We would argue that one should always at least try to do the right thing, though contacting corporate is a better way to deal with high-priced weirdness like this than just showing up at a retail store. You are, of course, legally entitled to keep anything shipped to you without having to pay for it.
Consumerist contacted Neiman Marcus to see if they had anything to say about the transaction, and also asked what customers should do if they find a similar shipment on their doorsteps. We’ll update this post when we hear back.
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist