Home Depot Glitch Gives Unexpected Gift To Online Shoppers — Free Orders

If you were doing some shopping on HomeDepot.com yesterday morning, you should check your order summary because you might have been the beneficiary of an oopsy by the home improvement retailer that allowed some customers to place orders they didn’t get charged for.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Home Depot site was supposed to be offering a $101 discount on a particular appliance on Thursday morning. However, someone goofed and somehow automatically applied the $101 discount to every order placed.

So if your order totaled under $101, you didn’t pay a thing. Any purchase more than $101 had that amount subtracted from the total cost at checkout.

This is the point in the article where we remind everyone that, in spite of urban myth to the contrary, retailers are not obligated to honor pricing errors and it would have been completely within the store’s rights to cancel these orders. But, presumably caught up in the holiday spirit, Home Depot opted not to go this route and simply notified customers of the mistake by e-mail while confirming that their orders would be processed with the big discount.

“It was a short, immaterial blip, but we hope it was a nice holiday surprise for a few customers,” a company rep tells the AJC, adding that the unspecified number of customers was not large.

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