Prisma Viikki and customer's rights revisited

I bought a lamp from Prisma for 24,95€. Because it was named "plafondi", I assumed it is a ceiling lamp: "plafond" is French for ceiling. But I was wrong. It was not for attachment to the ceiling, but for wall-mounting (strangely on Prisma's website it is called "Plafondi-seinävalaisin" which is an oxymoron). I realised that when I saw that the plug was of the regular type and not for a ceiling socket. So I exchanged the plug and attached it to the ceiling. When I screwed in the bulb and turned the light switch, it remained dark. I had bought the bulb (Megaman Liliput 11W E14 thread) together with the lamp from Prisma. I was even more perplexed when another E14 bulb worked perfectly in that lamp.

So I went to Prisma to have the lamp exchanged. I knew already that Prisma is not very forthcoming when it comes to customer's rights. And the word "Kulanz" is definitively a foreign word in Finnish. "Kulanz" doesn't even have a Finnish equivalent; it might be difficult to understand a concept you are missing the words for. Google translator translates it from German to Finnish (sic!) with "goodwill". I had bad experience from a few years ago when it took me several weeks and hours of time, many phone calls and e-mails to get a baby toy exchanged that was not even 20 Euros (see this post).

As expected they refused to exchange it or refund me. They insisted that I had modified the lamp by exchanging the plugs and thus voided my rights. That the lamp was not functional from the start did not seem to make any difference to them. They funnily actually offered to change the bulb, because it was not working, even though I explained them that the bulb socket is faulty and not the lamp. I asked for the superior of the person I was talking to, but she was just about to leave. I left my phone number and e-mail address and was promised that I would receive a call tomorrow.

When I got home, I decided that I would not spend that much time and energy on getting my rights as a customer as I did last time. I opened up the bulb socket thus voiding my rights even more and had a close look at the problem. The metal strip that was making contact with the thread of the bulb was just too short. Because the Megaman bulb had a wider bottom than the other bulb (the green plastic part on the picture), it couldn't be screwed in deeply enough to make contact with that metal strip.
An easy thing to fix. I just had to straighten the metal to make it a bit longer (it had been bent and was probably therefore to short). And voila! The Megaman bulb works now like a charm! However, I will get it exchanged anyway, because the sales person with whom I was talking did touch the bulb with her bare fingers which is not recommended because it reduces the life span of the bulb.

Now I don't need any goodwill from Prisma. Of course it's disappointing to see that Prisma has not learned anything. I think I will do a short boycott of Prisma. Long enough to make them loose more than the 20€ they would loose by exchanging that lamp. Prisma, get your act together! Do you really think you cannot afford 20€ to keep a customer that spends thousands of Euros per year in your shop? That's what goodwill is about: Doing more than the law requires in order to keep good customers. And one could argue that this case is not even about goodwill, but about plain customer rights.

I am looking forward to what Prisma will tell me tomorrow...