Jak M2 Shoes podvedla mě / How M2 Shoes Cheated Me

08/01/2010 - I purchased these boots from M2 Shoes (http://www.m2shoes.cz) in Avion Shopping Center in Brno, Czech Republic. My wife and I believe in paying extra for good quality and we thought we were doing that in this case. Accompanying the boots was a 24 month guarantee.

After one month the seam on the back of the boot started to tear. By the second month the pull tab on the other boot had completely torn. I don’t feel I exerted extraordinary force on the boots trying to get them on and it seemed to be a defect in construction.

08/03/2010 - I returned the boots to M2 Shoes expecting they would be repaired because of the warranty.

After two weeks I returned to see what the status of the boots was – nothing yet.

After one month I returned and to my surprise, they handed the boots back to me saying that the boots showed ‘heavy wear’ and because of this they were not going to honour the warranty. In fact, you can see on the claim sheet that they called the boots ‘totally devastated’ in Czech (‘totalne zdevastovana’) as the reason they would not honour the warranty.

The cost of repairing the boots would have probably been not more than 200 CZK but instead they hand the boots back to me one month later in exactly the same condition. During this time they had a client who was without boots in the middle of winter.

I assumed there must be some mistake as I am an office worker and my main use of the boots was from my flat to my office, both of which are in the same building. I was not using them for construction or any other type of heavy usage other than in the office and when I had to run errands in the town. You can see from the pictures taken 25.04.2010, that the boots are not ‘totally devastated’ or show signs of heavy usage.

At the time I refused to accept the boots and had someone from my Czech speaking legal team phone to the store to be sure I understood things correctly. My Czech is less than perfect and perhaps there was a misunderstanding. He confirmed that they would not honour the warranty because they felt the boots showed signs of ‘heavy wear’.

Unfortunately M2 Shoes knows the difficulty of pursuing this in Czech courts and that it is not worth the effort for me to sue them in court in order to have the warranty respected. But, like many other Czech businesses, they do not realize that by treating customers improperly, they will damage their reputation long-term.

24.04.2010 - I picked the boots up

25.04.2010 - I wrote M2 Shoes and Josef Seibel with the above complaint with no response

30.04.2010 - I wrote M2 Shoes and Josef Seibel again with no response to date from either