OfficeMax – Diggers battle highlights highly litigious society

I was going through Digg.com today just peeking at some of the highlighted stories when I came across a follow up to another stories. A week or so ago, someone noticed OfficeMax was selling 4GB thumb drives for $17.98. I am sure that all of use either know or assume this was a mistake.

Are we to the point now where we look hard for people to make mistakes, then we hammer them in a sleazy attempt to capitalize on it? I realize Amazon is big, but as a former small business owner who also was a Media Publisher, I dealt with issues like incorrect pricing. We actually had a disclaimer in our publication to protect our advertisers for such an instance.

If I was a small business owner who had incorrectly priced something, I surely wouldn’t want my kids to not be able to eat because there was a mistake.

I know there are a thousand conspiracy heads out there that will comment to me about how it was a bait and switch, or it was done intentionally to grab traffic. I am sure it was a mistake, I am just not that much of a conspiracy hound. These things happen, they have how many million products? Surely a pricing manager is going to screw up every now and then. Likely the same company had a 512MB Card with a all too similar UPC and it just got sticky fingered, big deal.

Now diggers are saying they are going to sue OfficeMax because they are entitled to capitalize on OfficeMax’s mistake. So what? Your going to hire a lawyer at thousands of dollars to save a hundred bucks on a flash drive? Grow up guys.

Someone screwed up, they did what any business would do, damage control. They didn’t say “Screw You!”, the just canceled the orders and moved on.

Let’s see how many honest Diggers are out there who don’t think that Digg is a medium to highlight mistakes and exploit them in mass.

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