Rogelio Villarreal is a Mexican doctor. One day, he was cruising around Instagram looking at stuff, and the stuff he was looking at included a pair of Cartier diamond-and-gold earrings. The price? 237 pesos (roughly $14 US). Who could resist that low, low price? Certainly not Dr. Villarreal, who recognized a bargain when he saw it.
So he clicked on the image and purchased himself some 237,000 peso ($14K) worth of Cartier earrings for fourteen bucks. Make that 474,000 pesos ($28K) worth of Cartier earrings for twenty-eight bucks. Villarreal knew a good thing when he saw it, and ordered a pair for himself and another for his mother.
Initially, Cartier tried to cancel the order altogether and compensate Villarreal with a bottle of champagne and leather cardholder to apologize for any inconvenience it had caused, Villarreal told CBS MoneyWatch. But Villarreal rejected the offer after deciding it was unsatisfactory, and instead raised the issue with Mexico's federal consumer protection agency. (Source: CBS News)
That was apparently enough for Cartier. They went and fulfilled the order, making Dr. Villarreal the proud possessor of two pair of earrings worth $28K.
Villarreal is very active on social media. (From what I can see from my quick stroll through his Twitter account - which has quite a following - he's plenty in love with himself and plenty fond of both raunch and luxury brands. And a bit thin-skinned. He tweet-told someone who suggested he was wrong to keep the earrings to stfu.)
Villarreal stirred up a bit of blowback, including from a Mexican Senator and social media moralist Lilly Téllez, who tweeted:
"Kids: What the buyer of the Cartier earrings did is not correct," she wrote. "It's wrong to be opportunistic and take advantage of a mistake at the expense of someone else, and abuse the law, even if it's in your favor, and outwit a business. It is more important to be honorable than to have a pair of Cartier earrings."
This got me to thinking about what I would do.
I'm the kind of person who points out to the server that they didn't put the second glass of wine or the dessert on the bill. Who asks the grocery store cashier whether they charged me for the bag of cherries.
On the other hand, if I find the error when I get home, I'm not all that inclined to pursue the matter.
A few years ago, I ordered a pair of sneakers from Amazon/Zappos. They never showed up. The picture of the delivery wasn't my doorstep. I walked up and down my street, looking at other doorsteps, and didn't find anyplace that looked anything like the spot where the sneakers had been dropped off. I waited a few days to see whether my sneakers showed up. And when they didn't, I asked Amazon/Zappos to send me a replacement pair. Which they did.
Fast forward a year+ and lo and behold, what showed up but the original pair.
Did I bother to send it back to Amazon/Zappos? No to the no, mostly because I didn't want to deal with trying to explain exactly what I was doing.
A bit similarly, I had an upstairs neighbor who, years after he moved away to god-knows-where (we weren't buds), got a box of fancy cookies for Christmas. I sent them back to the vendor, explaining that the gentleman no longer lived in my building. The next Christmas, another box of fancy cookies arrived from the same vendor. Once again, I returned them.
Christmas three? Third time was was the charm. I kept the fancy cookies, which were pretty darned good.
Anyway, I consider myself pretty honest, but not a hyper-scrupulous priss-ant who would walk six miles through a blizzard to the FedEx store to return the g.d. cookies.
But I can't imagine a circumstance in which I'd pounce on a $28K error.
Is this because I'm pretty honest, or because I wouldn't be looking at Cartier earrings or the like to begin with?
Maybe both.
But mostly I would worry about the person who made the mistake, who let such a major pricing error slide by. I'd worry about a low-level worker, and maybe their boss, and their boss's boss, losing their job over this.
Because I'd worry about some schnook getting fired, it probably wouldn't matter all that much to me whether we're talking about a big name company like Cartier, or My Local Jewelry Store. (That said, if those belated-arrival sneakers came my way from My Local Sneaker Store rather than from Amazon/Zappos, I would have called them or dropped the pair by.)
From a strict consumer point of view, Villarreal is certainly justified in keeping the earrings, rather than accepting Cartier's apology, champagne, and leather card case. (What's the opposite of caveat emptor? Is there a caveat seller?)
But this wasn't a company deliberately going out to screw the consumer.
And from an honesty perspective?
Honestly, I'm pretty much in agreement with Lilly Téllez. It is more important to be honorable than to have a pair of Cartier earrings
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