Losing Count

 Over the last decade or so I really have lost count of the number of times I’ve had to tell somebody that the business case we are discussing really isn’t as simple as they’re making it out to be. Part of that is just because I spent most of the last 12 years teaching business strategy and policy to undergraduate business students, but in fairness most people like problems with simple solutions, and are therefore prone to looking for simple solutions to every problem. But if running a business was really as simple as it looks you wouldn’t need people to manage them, and my students and I would all be out of a job…

Consider, if you will, a case that came up last week about a customer who ordered a bicycle online for pickup at a local dealership. Unfortunately, the bike in question has a load limit of 300 pounds, and when the customer turned up at the story to collect his purchase it became apparent that he was somewhat heavier than that. The article in the Global News doesn’t specify the customer’s exact weight, and he wasn’t willing to disclose it to the interviewer, but it was obvious enough that the owner of the bike shop refused to let the customer leave with the bicycle. This went over about as well as you would expect…

The shop’s owner argued that if the customer got on the bike at his current weight there was a non-zero chance that the frame would collapse, causing possibly serious injury. This is true, by the way – and if such a frame failure occurred while the customer was riding in traffic there is a real possibility that he could be killed in the resulting accident. The owner explains that not only was he unwilling to risk the legal exposure, but he felt that he had an ethical responsibility not to allow someone to be injured or killed by something he sold them...

The customer, in turn, argued that he knew better than to use his purchase in an unsafe manner, that he would wait until he had lost enough weight to get below the 300 pound limit before trying to ride his new purchase, and in any case it was a legal purchase and nobody else’s business what he did with it. The owner offered to store the bike for him until he reached the weight limit, refund his money so the customer could buy something else, or just release the bike if the customer would sign a waiver promising not to sue in the event of a frame failure, but the customer said he didn’t think he should have to sign a waiver just to pick up something he had already paid for…

Now, one could reasonably argue that a business can’t be held responsible for the unsafe usage of its products, no matter what those products happen to be. If a hardware store sells someone a chainsaw, and the customer manages to injure himself (fatally or otherwise) while trying to learn how to juggle chainsaws, no one is going to blame the owner of the store. The problem here is that riding a bicycle isn’t an obvious misuse of the product, and even if the bike shop (or the manufacturer) can claim to have pointed out the weight limit and the risks involved in exceeding it, there’s still a possibility that a jury might find against them…

I don’t have a simple answer to this question, either; as I noted at the top of this post, I’m not sure there is one. The underlying problem is that the standard in a civil trial isn’t “beyond a reasonable doubt,” it’s “what a reasonably prudent person would expect.” You also don’t have to convince all twelve members of the jury that you are correct; you only need 50% of them plus one. As tempting as it might be to just say the customer was warned about the hazards of the situation, and he can make up his own mind about safety, I think it is understandable as to why the owner of the bike shop is reluctant to roll those dice without at least a signed statement acknowledging that the customer was, in fact, warned about those hazards. Especially considering that nothing in this story suggests that the customer actually is reasonable or prudent. But even leaving the legal, ethical, or moral implications out of it, how does one resolve this problem from a practical standpoint?