According to the story from the local ABC News affiliate, a
woman in Jacksonville, Florida was having trouble with a used car dealership
that was failing to honor the warranty they had sold her. So she reported them to
the State Department of Motor Vehicles, and after due investigation the dealer
was ordered to refund her the money she had paid for the repairs. So they did –
in loose change. Specifically, it was about $85 in pennies and the rest in $1
bills…
Now, I’m not going to dispute that pennies or dollars are
legal tender, or that the dealership had a legal right to pay the refund in
whatever fashion they felt was appropriate. My questions are why anyone would
risk venting their spleen – and making themselves look even worse to potential
customers – by pulling this sort of prank, and also where a car dealership got
8,500 pennies in the first place…
In the Internet age, most businesses that want to be successful
are very careful about their public image, and in particular about their online
reputation. We’ve already seen people threatening to sue online review sites
like Yelp and Angie’s List for damaging their reputation, and there are
persistent reports of various companies large and small paying people to leave
positive reviews about them and artificially improve their online rating. By
the same token, if you’ve done something as blatantly stupid as playing games
with the small print on a contract and then getting called on it by the State
government, I would think the last thing you would want to do is create a funny
story that will get you mocked by thousands of scruffy bloggers around the
world…
The second part of the question is why anybody would go to
such lengths to pull such a prank in the first place. Car dealerships aren’t normally
cash businesses, and unless this one also doubles as a bank there is no reason
for them to have 8,500 pennies around in the first place. That may not sound
like a lot, but that’s around 50 pounds of coins. If you wanted to roll them it
would be enough for 170 rolls of pennies, but these were apparently just loose
in a couple of bags. Unless the dealership also doubles as a strip club it
shouldn’t have had 215 loose $1 bills lying around either, but I think we can
probably conclude that the owner went to the bank after deciding to be rude to
his customer…
Okay, so this story isn’t an atrocity. The customer in our
story can almost certainly roll up the pennies and take them to her bank, and
she can probably use the dollar bills to buy coffee or pay tolls or what have
you. And it is possible that the owner of the dealership believes that there is
no such thing as bad publicity, and is laughing all the way back to the bank.
But I prefer to believe that it’s a prank gone wrong, a customer’s multi-media
revenge, and a cautionary tale for anyone who might have been planning a
similar stunt – or anything else that will bring you to the negative attention
of the public…
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