tofu wrote: ↑Fri Sep 11, 2020 12:28 am
bort2.0 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 10, 2020 8:28 pm
Get a refund.
The hard thing about settlement money is determining the cost to get it repaired to the condition before shipping... Which is unknown to you firsthand. Invariably, the condition after repairs here will be a repaired tuba... more expensive than just attaining a pre-shipping level of damage
Or another way, if you are walking down the street eating an apple, and are halfway through the apple... And someone takes your apple and throws it away... They owe you half of an apple. Not a whole apple.
So you have a choice to take a refund or return or is that a seller option? If you take a refund do you have to pay for the return? Never been in that situation.
I'm not sure how eBay (or PayPal?) handles it. Because yes, if you get your money back, you don't also get to keep the tuba. I'd expect that shipping costs for the return are covered. The idea is to be "made whole." So if you were wronged by seller negligence, you shouldn't be out because of that.
When my Rudy Meinl was busted up in transit, it was because the seller took it to a UPS store and had them pack and ship it... and they did a poor job of it. I contacted a repairman (I think Lee Stofer?) to get a price quote for repairing the damage, and provided it to UPS. They sent an inspector to my apartment to check out the packaging and the damage (took 2 weeks to wait for them to come out, took about 45 seconds to do the inspection). A few weeks later, I received a check in the mail for the full amount of the repair quote.
Matt Walters did the repair work (plus some), and did an amazing job. He said the bell wasn't quite toast, but could have stood to be repaired. The bell is weakened, but should be fine as long as an adult is careful with it, and doesn't stand it on its bell too often. I had zero problems with it, and neither did the next owner of it. It was a lovely tuba, I probably should have kept it!