Lightman said:
Sure, however your example of having 25% missing is clearly a bigger concern than 8 ounces missing out of 128...
But yes, if I bought a product that was clearly visibly low to me, I don't think I'm that short fused to be pi**ed off per say, but I probably would contact the company and alert them to the situation, expecting a fix from them. I think where the conversation has drifted to however, is more of a criticism of cg's business practices in relation to this brief quality control issue. Again I guess my point is that since it was a short run of products that were less than full, because the amount shorted was relatively small, and because there hasn't been a lot of consumer noise (at least on the forums) about it, making right on the problem case by case seems the appropriate and only necessary response. I thought their response emails were pretty nice, and it was nice of them to offer to send out twice the product that was missing as a concession.
On a side note, I can't say enough good things about their f-seal product, I've used it on the last 4-5 cars I've done and am loving it!
I'm glad that CG resolved the issue for this guy and hopefully for anyone else that may have had the same problem, but the reason why some of us have a big problem with this, even if it doesn't affect us directly, is due to business ethics. Unless there's another side to this story, based on the email responses from CG it seems like they admitted to knowing about this problem beforehand.
This could have been resolved many ways.
#1) They could just ship the remaining 8 oz in another small container. This would have only been a temporary fix until the new container was manufactured, and it really wouldn't have cost them that much extra money.
#2) Sell the product as 120 oz, not 128 oz or a gallon. There's no deception involved here. If the customer fail to notice that it was 8 oz shy of a gallon, that would be his fault for not reading the product info thoroughly.
#3) Let the customer know about the issue and tell them you'll reimburse for that 8 oz they didn't receive. Most likely the customer will probably tell them not to even bother, since the difference would really be so small.
8 oz of product out of 128 oz doesn't seem like much, but that's quite a bit of product. Imagine some of your 16 or 32 oz bottles and picture it half or a quarter of the way gone. In terms of car care products, that's a lot that's missing. I'm sure you know how long it takes for you to go through a bottle of polish.
Instead of owning up to the issue from the beginning, they chose to keep quiet about it until a customer discovered and complained about the issue. It's easy to try and appease someone after they caught you in the act. Kissing *** usually work really well. But that still doesn't resolve the issue of why they chose to go this route in the first place. People would be much more forgiving if this was all just a mistake or a fluke, but to know about the problem and still go through with it is a different story.