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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

If he was no longer a customer, I assume they refunded his money?

If they did not refund his money, he was still a customer - a customer who was denied his product, certainly, but a customer nonetheless.

If you buy my product, and I don't deliver it to you for reason X, that doesn't mean you're not my customer. It just means I suck at delivering my product.

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The 'product' in this case was some abstract crap like 'the right to fly at a particular time pursuant to the terms and conditions set out on the website.' They're doing a great job of delivering their product; it's just a lousy product.

What if I choose not to pick up the product at the time we agreed upon without notifying you, causing you to make decisions about inventory and perhaps selling the product to someone else, and then return to you demanding the product at a later date?

Poor example. Implies you being forced to do things you would otherwise not have to do, which wasn't in the original example.

Better would be: If you rented me an apartment and I didn't move in right away. It would be unfair for me to demand a refund for the time I didn't move in, but it would also be unfair for you to rent the apartment to someone else if I already paid you for it.

Multiple leases I've signed had provisions about failure to take possession. If I didn't move in right away, or moved out early, I still owed the full rent for the lease period, but the owner could rent the place out to somebody else. (whether or not that's enforceable in a particular municipality is an entirely different matter)

He already paid for the product. In fact the delivery of the product came in 2 shipments.

For the first shipment he basically said to throw in the trash, now you as a business could throw it in the trash, or resell it since it's going to waste.

The customer was there for the second shipment yet you were not there to deliver.

He bought a seat on the plane. That he didn't use it doesn't mean it wasn't still his seat. If I ran the airline, I'd give him a 50% refund for the return leg, but if he didn't notify me that he wouldn't be taking the first flight I may not have been able to offer that seat to another paying customer.

Almost every flight during peak travel periods is oversold, which means that the airlines are selling more seats than they have (which sounds like fraud, since if you end up in an oversold flight and no one cancels, they ask the PASSENGERS to make the sacrifice, even though the reality is that the airline sold something that they no longer had)... so there was almost certainly someone else who got his seat.

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