Patrick's Place

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Monday's Morals

You sell your car to someone who pays for it in advance and tells you he can’t actually take possession of the car for several weeks. You charged a fair price for the car based on the blue book value, with no warranty, and have cashed the check and paid off bills with the money. Weeks later, on the way to drop it off to the buyer, you discover that the air conditioner isn’t putting out cold air like it used to. Do you tell the person of your last-minute discovery? Why or why not?

I have to say that my first reaction was that I would probably drop by the garage on my way and have it recharged for him. I'm a sucker.

Where I live, "weeks later" would probably mean that at one end or another of this transaction, the a/c was not an issue--either when he paid, or when I was delivering it the weather was cool enough not to need a/c. That being the case, I would assume that nothing had changed since he bought it.

Then again, if the car was a junker I wouldn't do that. I mean, if he paid me $500 for the car, he's getting nothing but trouble anyway. There are, frankly, a lot of variables just like in any ethical question. Can you tell we did a LOT of Values Clarification exercises when I was in school? ;-)

I would try VERY hard not to get into this situation in the first place: once I've sold something to someone, I'd want it off my property so that stuff like this wouldn't happen. Imagine if someone had STOLEN it while the guy was dinking around on pickint it up! Whose fault would that be? Would my insurance cover his loss? My head hurts just thinking about this....