Have I been living in a country with weak consumer protection for too long? I can't see refunding the product as byzantine, and I've never heard of anyone getting a refund at the new price.
But if the RAM was sold with Umart's promise to replace it (or the local laws' requirement that they replace it) if it prooved faulty within such and such a time period, then they owe the buyer a replacement.
If they don't want to provide an actual replacement, anything less than giving the buyer a full present-day replacement's worth of money, or a genuinely equivalent or better product, is breaking their own guarantee and/or the local law (I don't know Australian law).
They can't just say "actually it's more expensive now and we don't want to honor our replacement guarantee anymore, so we'll only give you a quarter of a replacement's worth of money instead". That's absurd.
They just want to shove their own bad luck/the consequences of the RAM shortage off on their customers in any way they can, whenever they think they can get away with it.
Which outcome is ideal? Which one is morally correct?
(A) the retailer refunds every customer, loses all of their profits and probably goes bankrupt
(B) the retailer is forced to go into massive debt in order to replace everyone's RAM, and may not recover from the debt, and may face legal consequences if they can't replace the RAM
(C) in the first place, the retailer should have been required to have a backup RAM stick for everyone that purchases the RAM, so that they are able to issue replacements if necessary, plus extra in case the replacements themselves are faulty. As a result, RAM prices before this incident were well over 2X the real manufacturing cost, in order to cover this "backup" cost (manufacturing, storage, etc.)
(D) something else?
(This is a much more extreme version of what actually happened, but maybe instructive to think about)
In Norway, the seller could legally claim the repair would be unreasonably expensive[1], comparing the price of the thing when sold to the price of the repair or a new equivalent item. They would then only have to refund the price of the product as sold minus a reasonable amount for the time you had it while it worked.
> In a simplified form, retailers are responsible for warranty claims and must replace or refund the defective item
The choice is at the retailer’s discretion and the refund is obviously of the purchase price.
This is a non story. The retailer is acting lawfully. The only curiosity is that normally it is in a retailer’s best interests to replace goods, but in these circumstances they are better off refunding them.
To address this I prefer ultra low friction and ultra low cost regulations over complex and performative schemes. For example, GDPR requires the appointment of a "data protection officer" in some cases, which is mostly just an extra fee for small companies. Instead, it should only regulate the rights (such as to be forgotton, etc.). Appointing such an officer is mostly performative.
I also fail to see where anyone would expect the current purchase price to be refunded to them instead of the original paid purchase price.
If the regulations require making the customer whole, then I could see an argument for current fair market value, or even just giving nominal interest on the purchase price.
If in your thought experiment, the retailers had a potential risk (requiring fair market value returns/replacement), and they failed to insure themselves from that risk, then they indeed deserve to be forced out of business.
This isn't what happened. It's nowhere near what happened. This will never happen. And our laws are written for the real world, not some hyperbole designed for corporate interests where any and all consumer protections are impossible because "what if the moon explodes".