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Comment by dougmccune | Hacker News Reader

I can't possibly imagine the time and energy wasted on this blog post and back and forth with the customer is worth $300. Not to mention the PR implications... you're calling your customers terrorists! Good god. You have an unhappy customer, give him his money back and move on.

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It's not about $300. It's about everybody else from now on who will discover getting $300 from Ignitiondeck is as easy as threatening some bad reviews.

Think of the bad PR as an investment. These people will hopefully move on to easier targets now.

Not saying I agree, but I think that's the rationale.

The angry customers aren't "getting" 300$. They're getting their money back. Virtuous giant lose virtually nothing in the process (perhaps the cost of the transaction and some man-minutes for processing the refund).

And customers wouldn't threaten some bad reviews if VG agreed to refund: They'd just get refunded and move on!

This is a pretty bad PR move in my opinion. In fact, it's worse than the threats that the original customer would have carried in my opinion.

Both parties have become completely entrenched "on principle" and are now acting in a way that economists wouldn't consider rational.

Maybe this is a cautionary tale? Personally, I think that both strict no-refunds policies and SEO blackmail threats are antisocial behavior.

Come on kids, you can do better than this.

Bad customers are a fact of life. A business should be able minimize damages from these types of customers.

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