I‘m sorry to inform You once again that there were no alternative tos given on the crowdfunding page.
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I’m confused now. Seems like Purism just confirmed shipping and you can get the refund?
Seems like that. After all that went down i‘ll wait with celebrating until the money is in my account, though.
Nope, not yet. And now is not a good point in time to do so. Should i get my money back it would considerably affect my vote.
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Not relevant, at all.
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All is not lost as a lawyer explained to me that the refund policy cannot be changed retroactively so this won’t hold in court (including small claims court). For those in states that have consumer protection laws, she mentioned that you or preferably your legal rep have send a 93A (demand letter). This starts a 30 day process for Purism to refund or rebuttal your demand. They tried to retroactively apply the new refund policy to me, but I declined that offer and would have started the demand process if they had not refunded me immediately after that. Again, if you purchased within their first and second refund policy periods. Purism will honour your refund, but you’ll probably have to assert your legal rights first.
While I don’t think it’s wrong that they changed their policy to deal with new orders from their lessons learnt, they shouldn’t be misleading earlier purchases about their right to a refund.
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They’ll definitely refund.
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Next time when you are about to order something just go to your mirror and ask “yourself” if agrees with your purchase, actually do this every time before you commit to something.
Again, not relevant at all.
Perhaps you are the one who should go to a mirror, but ask yourself if what you are about to respond is actually relevant to the topic under discussion.
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Is it that we talk here about people that do their work and deliver what you purchased?
Well, i don’t think that anyone here means their criticism personally. I am not talking about Coder Joe at Purism doing a bad job or anything. And i don’t see that in any other comment in this thread. So, there is no need to get agitated as no one wants to attack Your friends.
What i - and others here - criticise is how the company as a whole deals with its customers when it comes to honoring their right to refund. You talk about looking into the mirror and asking oneself whether one can stand behind what one does. So, You seem to be a very value-oriented person.
The same is true for me. Honesty, transparency and fairness to me are very important. This is one of the reasons i initially backed Purism’s campaign. Over the cause of time my impression changed, though. With every evasion, or even contradiction i had to admit more and more to myself that the decision to back the L5-campaign was wrong.
After many looks in the mirror i finally demanded a refund. Again, this was not the fault of some particular employee of the company. Purism’s reaction, however, showed me that this decision was totally right.
You seem to have made a different experience, and i am very happy for You. Really. Now, please try to walk in my shoes. My experience was not positive. I think i was a good friend. I fulfilled my part of the relationship, and was patient for a very long time - despite all the mistakes. No one is perfect, You are right. But while i wanted to go seperate ways as friends, they became very unfriendly. How would You behave in such a situation?
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I remain skeptical. The email i was supposed to get from their finance department could not be read as something was wrong with the encryption. May be bad luck, of course. We’ll see. Probably over the weekend nothing more will happen, and one can see how this little debate here develops…
Edit:
This post was wrong. South San Francisco is not in the county of SF, but in San Mateo. So far i haven’t found anything about video meetings on this court’s website.
I know the timing may be bad, but your bank may very well have the muscle to get your money back. You are in the late stage of having been strung along — and they used your bank to do it. Banks do not appreciate this, as it also undermines them (mine has always been supportive in cases like this, and I also work for another American bank).
I would press this with your bank (or cc company), and kick off your complaint by focusing on a protracted likely fraud, and that you have evidence that this is a pattern with other widely reported instances. You might be surprised how fast they get your money back.
With three or four days left in my 7-day window to cancel my order, I asked Purism for my customer account number several times (they knew I was contemplating a cancelation, and that a seller of a pre-order would need my account number to transfer ownership). This request has never been acknowleged, while other questions I have asked have been. I passed my 7-day window 2 hours ago, I believe. My online logins and Librem.One account were screwed up (by them, not me) and I have been distracted in trying to untangle them — with answers from support like “I don’t know why it’s so hard for you to understand” and “I have deleted your Librem.One account.” What the…?! The Librem.One. username AND recovery email I set it up with are now denied.
All of this undermines my confidence in Purism.
It is one thing to have delays, but quite another to be evasive with pre-paid customers. I hope Purism gets its act together.
Before more bankers take notice.
“get a refund once you actually have your phone”
How nice for Purism, it gets to use your money for free, at your expense.
I wonder how many times Purism could use the same new returned phone to fill another very late order of someone else waiting for delivery just to get a refund.
Run that one through your salad shredders.
#warmfuzzies
Crowdfunding is different from purchasing.
And that makes it acceptable in your mind for the party asking for funds to change the terms of the agreement after they receive the funds to be more in their favor?
I’m with you that there are inherent risks in crowdfunding that are more than those in pre-ordering which are yet more than making a direct purchase; but I don’t see how those inherent risks change how terms of an agreement should be kept, or only changed via a new mutual agreement. Changing a policy going forward is one thing, changing it retroactively is quite another.
Also not everyone here is a part of the crowd funding. Pre-orders before a given date also were originally under an agreement of receiving a refund promptly and not “when it’s your turn in the queue to receive a phone”. So saying “crowdfunding is different from purchasing” doesn’t acknowledge that a pre-order is a purchase and not crowd funding.
I don’t personally comprehend why someone that was a part of the crowdfunding would only now (recently) be looking for a refund as that just doesn’t compute for me. I don’t have to understand that to understand no one should be finding out that the agreement changed from what they had agreed to into the other parties favor when the other party is making the change unilaterally.
The phone shouldn’t be returned, but rather never shipped since that’s when the refund should be handled. This does allow for Purism to perform the refunds throughout the order fulfillment process and not end up with a bunch of extra phones which is a good thing. This could theoretically result in more orders being “fulfilled” in a given time period than “normal” if there is a spike in refunds at a given section of the orders (this seems unlikely to me, but a theoretical possibility).
I think this ultimately boils down to resource allocation for purism. Instead of dedicating x% of staff time to dealing with refunds regardless of place in line they can focus on emptying the queue and more easily see the progress and remaining orders.
I personally don’t agree with some of the choices along the way, but I do see the end location as a desirable one for Purism.
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I haven’t seen evidence that the terms, as they applied to the crowdfunding, did change. I’ve used the wayback machine to look at the terms and conditions specified for the crowdfunding.
Definitely true. However my comment, that was quoted in the reply, was specifically about crowdfunding - and that is because the OP is a crowdfunder.
That’s what happens when someone necros a comment from 14 days ago. It gets taken out of context.
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I hope you are right and that this is not one and only iteration of purism phone the world will see. The situation lately eerily reminds me of Neo Freerunner. The difference being, openmoko went all-or-nothing into the phone business. Purism is more branched out. But, all these delays make me doubt their resilience.
You are definitively right that there is a huge potential demand, but I wonder if the consumer base for such a product is willing to bank on Purism to deliver. And, again, once they finally send out the preordered phones, will they be able to sustain their efforts? Technology moves quickly, how will they ever be able to catch up given the constraints?
I think I still have my freerunner somewher 