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When buying furniture and shortly after the first use, consumers quite frequently experience problems with respect to quality and usability of the purchased item, leading to complaints. These are often not sufficiently being dealt with by the retailer or aftersales services and are therefore being brought to court. The authors of this study are expert witnesses and deal with these cases inter alia. In this context it became evident that sometimes there were no national or European standards (no consumer friendly standards respectively) available that could help clarifying the problems underlying the consumer complaints.
Retailer or producers often use to declare the source of the problem as a product specific characteristic, hence not constituting a deficiency.

Roundabout 500 court-cases related to furniture dated from the last three years were examined, leading to a detailed analysis of approximately 230 court cases that are representative with respect to the product group (e.g. kitchen furniture, upholstered furniture), the price range (low, medium, high), the value of the claims and the geographical distribution within Germany. The results are clearly arranged in a table sorted by product groups, supported by pie charts.

Roughly two-third of the complaints are related to medium-priced furniture. There are only few complaints related to beds. However, all were justified. With respect to the value of the claims, not unexpectedly kitchen furniture represented the major part. The reason being that they comprise valuable built-in units and corrective maintenance can be quite laborious and expensive.

The authors of the study assessed whether the specifications in the existing standards are sufficient from a consumer’s perspective (53 % of the cases) or whether there was a need to amend the standards in order to evaluate the standard-based circumstances of the complaint (21 % of the cases). Additionally, 12 % of the cases revealed a need to elaborate new standards. 13 % of the cases indicated that there was a need to disclose more meaningful information to consumers by creating related leaflets with respect to e. g. placing furniture, cleaning of furniture surfaces and specific product characteristics of furniture and fabrics, especially of upholstered furniture. Precice proposals with respect to necessary amendments of standards and the initiation of new standards were elaborated.

Altogether, the study reveals a need for action particularly with respect to standardization and consumer elucidation in order to protect consumer’s interests.

You can order the complete text of the study (in the German language version only) free of charge from Verbraucherrat