Chinese consumer protection: how Banggood went bad.

I've made a couple of new online friends, Phenix and Kelvin. It's unlikely that we'll ever meet face-to-face as they live (or certainly work) in Guangzhou, China. They are employed by the Chinese-based global online crapola outfit, Banggood, which specialises in churning out cheap rubbish that is misleadingly - or even fraudulently - advertised online. The ads are pushed via Facebook and other social media, so you appear to be 'chosen' - targetted might be a better description - to receive them. The catalyst for the interesting range of emails Phenix, Kelvin and I have been exchanging concerns this garment

, which Banggood described in the ad they 'selected' for me as a winter corduroy coat. Now, I once owned a very warm and capacious corduroy coat, made from heavy weight cotton corduroy, with warm and generous insultated padding and thought the advert was describing something similar. I've never been to China, but I know winter there brings temperatures far lower than ours in the UK and felt sure the coat would be a real bargain at the advertised price of GBP 28.86. But things were not to be as good as they were promised. When the garment arrived, it turned out to be something more on the lines of a shoddily made shirt. No padding, or even 'real' corduroy as it is 90% polyester. Now, with goods that don't match their description, under UK and EU law, we have a remedy that allows us to claim a refund and for the supplier, usually, to carry the cost of return. But things played out rather differently once I told Phenix and Kelvin about Banggood's porky-pie ridden online advert. For a refund of GBP 9, I would have to pay the return postage! Nice try, I thought, but not really what I wanted to hear - after all, this was as blatant a case of intentional misleading advertising that you could come up with, and one where Banggood were expecting me to either accept the crap, or make an unintentional GBP 19.86 'donation' to their coffers. The bad guts don't get to profit from their wrongdoing - pretty much a cardinal principle of Western consumer law, but one where China has some catching up to do. In the meantime, don't get suckered by Banggood's push ads.

Just a tiny bit call centre

I'm looking for some extra work at the moment and was offered a 'phone interview for a job with one of the major outsourcing companies (no names, you'll see why...) The advert was non-specific on a number of key areas: I knew what service was being provided, but for whom and how were well hidden behind generic - and in several places ungrammatical - waffle. A few minutes in, the HR bod mentioned that the job could involve handling a number of telephone calls, to which I asked 'is this a call centre?' A pretty straightforward question in the circumstances, one would have thought. To which the answer ran along the lines of 'no, um, rather yes'. It either is or it isn't - you can't be a 'little bit' call centre any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. There comes a point when relativism has to meet certain boundaries and I felt less than comfortable that an prospective employer could want to hide the real nature of a job by advertising in such broad terms.