What would you do if the company you’d bought beds from claimed they’d delivered the wrong product and wanted more than $2,000 to make up the difference?
Well, that’s pretty much the scenario that presented itself to a Richmond resident last summer when she bought two twin beds from Yaletown Interiors on Bridgeport Road.
Santosh Goel purchased the beds last June on the understanding that it had a storage component along the side, as per the one she viewed in Yaletown’s showroom.
The bed company duly delivered the beds in question and assembled them at the customer’s home.
Company employees wanted to exchange the beds
But when employees returned a few days later to replace some “mismatched bed knobs,” they said to Goel’s husband that they needed to exchange the delivered beds’ storage drawers for non-storage bed rails and slats.
Yaletown claimed that the beds with storage drawers – even though it was what Goel had looked at in the showroom - were not what Goel paid for and that they had delivered the storage beds by mistake.
Goel’s husband refused the offer. It’s not clear from court documents whether the couple got the mismatched bed knobs replaced.
Yaletown took the matter to a Civil Resolution Tribunal (CRT), asking for the $2,181.76 for the delivered beds’ alleged price difference and an extra delivery charge.
CRT rules in favour of customer
But in a recently published CRT ruling, it was decided that the customer was not liable for the difference.
In his ruling, CRT member Chad McCarthy, said, among other things, that Yaletown “has not met its burden of showing the parties agreed non-storage beds would be provided for the paid purchase price.”
Yaletown had argued that the beds viewed in the showroom by Goel could be ordered either with or without the storage drawer feature, adding that she allegedly selected and paid for the bed version without the storage feature, which it says was cheaper but was not on display.
Specifically, a Yaletown salesperson, told the CRT that Goel selected the non-storage beds after the price difference was explained to her.
“I find internal Yaletown documents in evidence, as well as the written statement of the employee who loaded the beds, SD, show that Yaletown intended to deliver beds without storage but actually delivered beds with storage,” wrote McCarthy.
However, Goel denied seeing any of those internal documents and McCarthy added that he found “the evidence does not demonstrate that she saw them or knew about Yaletown’s internal bed delivery intentions.”
Additionally, a Yaletown invoice listed, among other purchases, two “twin beds” with model numbers, without stating whether those beds had a storage feature or not.
McCarthy said he found neither Yaletown’s nor Goel’s version of events at the showroom more reliable than the other and that none of the evidence shows that Goel picked the non-storage beds.
