Should/can he demand his money back?

[ACS]

As an aside, if your son had bought via the internet and the same fault occurred, how long would it have taken to get your problem solved I wonder?

Distance Selling Regulations 2000 cover internet sales, as far as I can recall

 

[Tynan]

indeed, an internet sale is still a sale, the only people that might want to suggest otherwise would be internet sellers

 

[Jaded]

An internet sale has the added right that you can return the item within 7 days, no reason required.

 

[mickle]

I would agree that five weeks to change a part that would take me (an amateur) 40 minutes to change, simply is not cricket. I would have asked about the possibility of a loaner at the time of the malfunction - and I would have been polite about it.

If it was a store that I, or any of my colleagues ran, then we'd ''sort out the customer first'' then worry about who pays for it later. If Giant didn't like it, we wouldn't sell their gear any more. If anyone in the future asked why, we'd tell them the truth. Our company have done this sort of thing several times in the past. (Yes, I do work in retail.) Manufacturers get the message pretty quickly when their sales team come round looking for orders and get only "No thanks. Nice product, rubbish customer service. We're not having your firm ruin our reputation."

Hear hear! The customer is king. They should have fixed it on the spot and charged the distributor for the labour. It's standard practice. The trouble is, and this puts me in mind of Joe24's issues with the service quality at his Giant dealer, young persons just don't have the skills to deal with this sort of crap. DomT is right, (ow!) if an adult had gone in to resolve this they wouldn't have been so easily fobbed off.