Posts Tagged ‘warranty of fitness for a particular purpose’

Design defect in American Leather sleeper sofa sold by Jordan’s Furniture

Monday, February 1st, 2010

February 1, 2010

Legal Department
Jordan’s Furniture
450 Revolutionary Drive
East Taunton, MA 02718-1369

To whom it may concern:

I am writing to you about a design defect in a piece of furniture sold to me by Jordan’s Furniture. This defect is sufficiently serious and egregious as to violate both the implied warranty of merchantability and warranty of fitness for a particular purpose. After explaining the problem below, I will explain how I expect you to compensate my wife and me for it.

In November 2007, we purchased an American Leather sleeper sofa at your store in Natick, MA. Several months after the sofa arrived, the end of the zipper holding one of the cushions began to separate from the back of the sofa, so we called and scheduled a technician to come look at it.

He said it could not be repaired and the sofa would have to be replaced. The model was no longer available, and rather than replacing our defective sofa with the closest equivalent, you instead gave us a credit for the original purchase price and told us we could use it toward the purchase of a replacement. The problem was that the new model cost $420 more. In other words, you sold us a defective sofa and then expected us to pay over $400 to replace it within their warranty period.

Needless to say, we were unhappy about this, and we complained. A customer service representative agreed for Jordan’s to absorb half of the incremental cost of the replacement sofa, thus reducing our out-of-pocket cost to $210. We accepted this offer with reservations.

Additional details about the events described above are available on my blog at <http://blog.kamens.brookline.ma.us/~jik/wordpress/jordans_warranty>.

Fast forward to a few months ago, when the same zipper on the same cushion on our replacement sofa began to separate from the sofa in exactly the same way. Not only that, but because of the separation, the zipper comes undone when people lean back on the cushion. (more…)