Why can’t Lifestyle & Mobility store show compassion after my loss? | Consumer affairs

I bought a £435 wheelchair for my disabled daughter from my local Lifestyle & Mobility store.

She had been admitted to hospital for tests and I planned to use the chair to take her on outings when she was discharged.

The next day, her condition deteriorated and she died two days later. She was 46.

The wheelchair had never left the boot of my car and, since the store and the car park were in an indoor shopping centre, had never been taken outside.

I begged Lifestyle & Mobility to allow me to return it, even for a partial refund, but it has refused.

My daughter was a single parent and the money would make a difference to her teenage daughter; moreover, the wheelchair is another reminder of our loss and it hurts to look at it.

JS, Bournemouth

I’m very sorry to hear of your loss. You have tried for the past three months to sell the wheelchair privately online but to no avail.

You bought it in person because you try to support local stores.

If you had bought it online, you could have saved up to £100 and benefited from a statutory 14-day cooling-off period.

Lifestyle & Mobility has no legal obligation to refund you, but I hoped, given the grievous circumstances, that compassion would prevail. It did not.

It told me that customers are only refunded if a product is faulty or mis-sold. “Given the nature of our business, we are regrettably familiar with circumstances of the sort this customer is experiencing,” it says. “Be assured that we take no pleasure in having to apply the above criteria in such cases.”

Its terms and conditions suggest differently. These state that any goodwill variations to the refund policy are at the discretion of the company.

I asked it twice why it will not use its discretion in your case, which, given your daughter died so young, and so suddenly, before the chair was unpacked, strikes me as exceptional. It did not reply.

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