Email Gaffes - "About That Email Offer We Sent You . . . ."
There's a contract scenario that law students are exposed to early on in their legal education, which focuses on the basic concepts of offer and acceptance and what constitutes an offer. Typically a seller makes a mistake in printing ads and offers higher priced items for ridiculously low amounts. Must the retailer honor the offer for customers who trudge to the store to purchase the $5 television?
Best Buy experienced a variant of this scenario, as Evan Schuman notes here:
If the slip of a lip can sink a ship, perhaps a retailer's flick of the click can kill a prestigious campaign mighty quick. The best way for a retail chain to make a customer happy is to offer him/her a program that few others can get. And the best way to undermine that—as Best Buy discovered on Wed. (Sept. 3)—is to then accidentally make that offer to every single reward customer you have.
The chain sent out invites to its exclusive Premier Black members—supposedly limited to the biggest spenders in the chain—on Wednesday, but inadvertently E-mailed it to the full CRM database. Oops!
The chain sent out invites to its exclusive Premier Black members—supposedly limited to the biggest spenders in the chain—on Wednesday, but inadvertently E-mailed it to the full CRM database. Oops!
From a contract standpoint, does it matter whether the customers actually opened the email offer before receiving Best Buy's retraction? This is a contract prof.'s dream hypo (and the worst nightmare of those involved at Best Buy legal, I'm sure).
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