Shortcuts: Buyer, Be Aware the Law Is on Your Side

But when the saleswoman rang them up, they were full price. I pointed to the sign. She told me boots were excluded. I told her it didn’t say that anywhere and asked for the manager. The manager told me that “some signs” indicated the exclusion, but that didn’t seem to be true.

We were at an impasse. I could have walked away, but I wanted the boots and they were still a good price. I bought them, but filed an online complaint form with the store.

As often happens, though, I wondered if this was just an annoying incident or actually illegal? What do consumer laws require and what don’t they?

It’s surprising what a thicket of laws and regulations are out there and how difficult it can be to determine what agency has jurisdiction over what product or service.

I thought I could sort it all out but I quickly realized that I would need to write a thesis rather than a column if I wanted to cover all the laws. So I decided to focus on some of the ones consumers might most need to know.

First, there’s the concept of the implied warranty. Yes, we all know that any major appliance or product is going to fail days after the manufacturer’s warranty runs out. But apparently, that’s not the end of the story.

Have you heard about the concept of “implied warranty of merchantability?” It is part of the Uniform Commercial Code, first published in 1952.

That means, said Anthony Giorgianni, associate finance editor for Consumer Reports Money Adviser, that when a retailer sells you something, it is giving you an unwritten assurance that the item being sold will perform how it is supposed to for a reasonable period of time. This implied warranty overrides any return policy or limitations in the manufacturer’s warranty.

All states have adopted, in some form or another, this provision of the Uniform Commercial Code or similar legislation, he said.

Now, that doesn’t mean a product is supposed to last forever.

“Most states assume four years is a reasonable amount of time,” Mr. Giorgianni said. The only way to escape the implied warranty is to post in a visible place that a product is being sold “as is” or “with all faults.” Some states, however, prohibit retailers from using such disclaimers.

There is also the “implied warranty of fitness for a particular purpose,” which means that if you bought something that you were told would serve your needs — like a washing machine that is supposed to handle 15 pounds of laundry but, as you later find out, won’t wash more than 10 pounds — you can request a refund or replacement, Mr. Giorgianni said.

And remember that while implied warranties and unwritten assurances may be on your side, it’s always best to get a retailer’s assurances in writing.

This is all fine and good, but it’s hard for me to imagine going into a retailer with, say, a digital camera that has failed to work, and arguing that it should be replaced under an implied warranty.

Or rather, it’s easy to imagine me doing it. It’s hard to imagine the salesperson willingly handing over a new camera.

Well, Mr. Giorgianni said, it can actually work.

“I walked into Wal-Mart with a broken cordless telephone after the 90-day return policy,” he said. “I asked for the manager and said it’s not reasonable that a cordless phone should break down after 90 days. I think I even had a copy of the Connecticut Uniform Commercial Code I used to carry in my wallet.

“The guy had no idea what I was talking about, but told me to get another one.”

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Shortcuts: In a Data-Heavy Society, Being Defined by the Numbers

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。

I?HAVE a confession to make. I started using Twitter about six months ago and eagerly watched my “followers” rise — 20 to 30 to 40. I made it to 60 and suddenly plateaued — a few would follow and then (heartbreak) “unfollow.”

At one point, I signed up my sons, who didn’t even use Twitter, to follow me. While part of me was laughing at myself — how senseless was this? — I also took some pleasure in seeing my numbers rise.

Numbers and rankings are everywhere. And I’m not just talking about Twitter followers and Facebook friends. In the journalism world, there’s how many people “like” an article or blog. How many retweeted or e-mailed it? I’ll know, for example, if this column made the “most e-mailed” of the business section. Or of the entire paper. And however briefly, it will matter to me.

Offline, too, we are turning more and more to numbers and rankings. We use standardized test scores to evaluate teachers and students. The polling companies have already begun to tell us who’s up and who’s down in the 2012 presidential election. Companies have credit ratings. We have credit scores.

And although most people acknowledge that there are a million different ways to judge colleges and universities, the annual rankings by U.S. News & World Report of institutions of higher education have gained almost biblical importance.

“Numbers make intangibles tangible,” said Jonah Lehrer, a journalist and author of “How We Decide,” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). “They give the illusion of control.”

Too many people shopping for cars, for example, get fixated on how much horsepower the engine has, even though in most cases it really doesn’t matter, Mr. Lehrer said.

“We want to quantify everything,” he went on, “to ground a decision in fact, instead of asking whether that variable matters.”

Even before we could measure — and flaunt — numbers online, some had long been a reference point. Consider the many years that fans have meticulously followed baseball statistics.

And we often do need to find ways to measure and evaluate people and products in as objective a way as possible.

The trouble, though, is when we mindlessly and blindly rely on those numbers to tell us everything, said Sherry Turkle, a professor of social studies of science and technology and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Initiative on Technology and Self.

Numbers become not just part of the way we judge and assess, but the only way.

“One of the fantasies of numerical ranking is that you know how you got there,” said Professor Turkle, who is the author of “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other” (Basic Books, 2011). “But the problem is if the numbers are arrived at in an irrational way, or black-boxed, so we don’t understand how we got there, then what use are they?”

My colleague Michael Winerip recently wrote an article about an excellent and exceptionally dedicated middle-school teacher, with terrific performance evaluations. But a formula used by the New York Department of Education put the teacher in the seventh percentile of her teaching peers.

That formula used 32 variables plugged into a statistical model that “appears transparent, but is clear as mud,” Mr. Winerip wrote.

And even if we understand the numbers — something as apparently clear-cut as how many books an author sells — they aren’t always helpful.

Robin Black, author of the short story collection, “If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This,” (Random House, 2010) wrote a blog post on how fretting about the different ways to measure her book’s success has overshadowed why she wrote it in the first place.

“I go to a place where everything has a number,” Ms. Black told me. “How many advance copies, how many reviews, how many sales.”

Amazon recently made it possible for authors to check how many books they’ve sold and, using interactive maps, it even zeroes in on how many sales occurred in which cities.

“Twenty years ago, maybe every Sunday you looked at The New York Times best-seller list,” she said. “Now you can torture yourself 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It becomes an exercise in scab-picking.”

And those black-and-white statistics, while arguably irrefutable in one way, really tell us almost nothing. Amazon’s rankings of book sales, for instance — which anyone can view — can vary wildly based on the sale of very few books.

All those numbers help us lose sight of why we’re really doing what we’re doing. Ms. Black, for instance, said her books were largely about loss.

“I’ll get a letter from someone who says, ‘My daughter died, and reading your book really helped,’?” Ms. Black said. “That’s so meaningful. How do I measure that against 500 Twitter followers?”

Eric Frankel is founder of a company called 10 Minutes to Change, which works on human resources strategies and talent management, which means figuring out how to improve workers’ performance.

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