[PatNY]

Originally Posted by hrosvit

The portion of the PA AG's website you are linking to does not deal with deliveries by mistake. It deals with intentional deliveries under a "negative option" deal, where they deliberately mail you a product, and then obligate you for a further purchase if you keep it. Entirely different notion.

The concept of mistake deals with a product that is sent to the wrong location, or (as in this case) in an incorrect amount. Best Buy is not attempting to get you to buy five iPads by sending them to you; they just screwed up and sent five, when you only ordered one. The extra four are goods delivered by mistake, not as an attempt to obligate you to pay for them in the future.

We are talking about two different types of mistakes in this thread:

1) mistakes that occur during the delivery process (or misdeliveries)

2) mistakes that occur during order processing (processing mistakes) such as the one that resulted in the customer getting 5 ipads from Best Buy and in which no delivery mistake is involved.

The portion of the PA AG's website I linked to does not cover misdeliveries. But it likely covers processing mistakes. Otherwise, any company sending consumers unsolicited items with the intent to get them to buy could merely claim as a defense that it was a processing error and get away with their tactics. So the law is interpreted broadly on behalf of consumers to protect them. And sites such as The Consumerist, which was part of the original story, are also reading the law this way.

One would have to look at case law to see if this specific issue has come up in the past, but a brief search fails to show instances where a company has successfully sued to get back merchandise it included by mistake in an order. I suspect that's why companies normally don't ask for the merchandise back. Because the law is not on their side. That doesn't mean they never ask for it back. They just usually don't.

The PA law requires that you make an attempt to return them to the rightful owner; if they refuse or don't respond, then the items belong to you.

That's only in the event of a misdelivery (delivery mistake). In the case of the 5 iPads, there was no misdelivery. Only a processing mistake. So the PA law you initially mentioned would not apply here. Can you cite a single precedent where a person was prosecuted or sued for keeping unsolicited items that were correctly addressed to and sent to them?

Additionally, the portion of the USPS website you linked to again deals with things that were deliberately sent to you, and states that you are not obligated to pay for them. It does not deal with things delivered by mistake at all.

Again, there was no delivery mistake in the case of the customer who got the 5 iPads. That's an important distinction here and in the law. The mistake was in the order processing stage. The 5 iPads were deliberately shipped to the customer. The shipping company did its job perfectly and made no mistakes. Therefore, the case of the 5 iPads would fall under the protection of the federal law cited on the USPS website -- and the PA AG's guidelines on their website as well. It would not fall under the PA law that you originally cited.

--Pat