Apparently this news is a few days old, but it’s new to me. I was just watching a news segment that talked about a couple named Jin Nam Chung and Ki Chung who operate a dry cleaning business called “Custom Cleaners†located in Washington. Now apparently about 2 years ago one of that State’s judge named Roy L. Pearson went to the cleaner to have his suits and pants altered. When he went to pick it up, apparently the pants was missing and so he demanded for $1000 to replace the suit. However, a few days later the store owners found the pants and so they decided not to pay and as a result the judge decided to sue them.
Now here comes the absurd part. The Chung’s decided to offer three settlements to get it over with which was first $3,000 which went up to $4600 and then even $12,000 which Pearson was still not satisfied with. Instead, Pearson factored in things such as having to rent a car every weekend as he no longer wanted to use a local dry cleaner which he is asking for about $15,000 for. The main bulk of the total comes from the fact that he mentions that the Chung’s dry cleaning business had a sign and policy stating “Satisfaction Guaranteed†and a “Same Day Service†statement which he feels that they did not live up to.
From what I saw, the report mentioned that in DC there is consumer protection law that fines businesses $1,500 per violation each day. In total, he determined that the business had 12 violations over the period of about 1,200 days and that there was a total of three defendants. As a result, the company was being sued for about 65 million dollars. All this just for a pair of pants and I guess it worked out to about something like this:
$1,500 x 12 Violations = $18,000
$18,000 x 1,200 days = $21,600,000
$21,600,000 x 3 Defendants = $64,800,000
Laws are different everywhere in the world, but how this even got through any kind of law system is mind puzzling as it seems like such a frivolous lawsuit. I would definitely vouch for the dry cleaning store owners on this one. I hope they win and then take that judge to the cleaners in a different way of course.
On a different note, this sure raises an interesting point on those guarantee signs that a lot of companies use. I guess this is a good example on how if you have some kind of satisfaction or guarantee policy that you have to make it explicit on what you mean by it or else something like this can happen.