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Call Kurtis: Store Won't Give Customer the Chandelier She Bought

WEST SACRAMENTO (CBS13) -- Lydia Trujillo looked down at her receipt, listing the $595 chandelier she'd purchased along with the words "all sales final."

Trujillo had been looking for the perfect chandelier for her dining room for months. After measuring and taking pictures, she thought this one was it, paying for it in full from The Estate Lady's Antique Shop in Fair Oaks.

The store employee just needed a few hours to take it down from the store ceiling, she said.

"I said, 'OK, I'm not in a big rush,'" she said. "I own it now."

The store disagreed.

Several hours after swiping her credit card, Trujillo got a call from the owner saying the employee had charged the wrong price: It should have been listed at $1,500 -- more than two and a half times what she originally paid.

"As far as she was concerned, I couldn't have it," Trujillo said.

Owner Joy Bullard offered her a $200 discount on the fixture but said she couldn't honor the original sale price.

That's when Trujillo saw her receipt again, stating "all sales final."

"They gave me their word," she said. "I made this purchase and now they're saying, 'Sorry, we've changed our mind."

In 2001, the California Supreme Court ruled contracts can be canceled if there's a typo or clerical mistake on the price.

Call Kurtis asked consumer attorney Stuart Talley to look into it.

"Sometimes mistakes happen," he said.

Under contract law, he said, if the company made a clerical mistake on a big purchase that is clearly unfair, that company could sue you to get it back -- as many as four years later, according to the statute of limitations. That means even if Trujillo brought her chandelier home, it still may not be hers, Talley said.

"If the store discovered the mistake, they could sue her to get the chandelier back, and rescind the contract," he said.

Call Kurtis reached out to Bullard, who apologized, but said she couldn't afford a $900 loss.

"Our employee had written down the wrong price," Bullard said. "There was a huge oversight, and it's an honest mistake."

Trujillo's refund was processed the next day.

Trujillo now plans to look elsewhere for her perfect chandelier.

Call Kurtis has learned most cases like this are thrown out unless there's a lot of money at stake, but according to the California Supreme Court, the company does in fact have a right to cancel the contract.

We're told such cases, however, are extremely rare.

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