The Voice (Botswana)

HOW many CHAIRS should THEY FIX?

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Mr Harriman, please help me.

I took my 6 dining chairs to a cleaning company which volunteere­d to return them to my house after being cleaned. I realised later that 2 of them were damaged. I called the company and went to them with the photos of the damaged chairs. The guys who delivered the chairs ‘neglected’ to tell me that the chairs had fallen on to the tarmac when delivering them to my house. The 2 damaged chairs were returned to the cleaning company and the other 4 at my house. They asked me to look for material for covering all 6 chairs, which I did. Now they have covered the 2 damaged chairs and are refusing to cover the remaining 4.

The owner of the company is telling me that I chose expensive material and he won’t cover the remining 4 chairs. I was never told that there is a price limit on the material I choose. They previously told me they would cover all 6 and not 2.

Is this fair on me?

No, I don’t think this is fair on you at all. You had a right to expect that the cleaning company would treat your property as if it was their own property. You had a right to expect that if an accident happened (as they sometimes do), they would fix whatever damage they caused.

However, I think the company made a terrible mistake, one that might cost them a lot of money. I think they were probably only required to fix the damage they actually caused. I don’t think they were obliged to do anything to the four chairs they didn’t damage. Obviously they’re required to do their very best to fix the two damaged chairs as well as they could and so they matched the undamaged ones but I don’t think they had to do anything more than that.

However, if they put the promise to repair all six in writing you might be able to force them to do it, otherwise I think the best you can do is to demand that the two damaged chairs are repaired so they are as close to the undamaged ones as possible. That really is the LEAST they can do.

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