Pricey accessory: Rs225,000 damages sought for losing a cap

'The petitioner had been offered compensation but he had refused'.

LAHORE:

A consumer court has fixed September 10 for preliminary arguments in a suit against the Pearl Continental Hotel’s general manager seeking Rs225,000 in damages for allegedly losing the petitioner’s cap that he claimed to have paid Rs25,000 for.

Petitioner Shoaib Ahmed submitted that he had purchased a Lacoste cap from Dubai for DHM900 (approximately Rs25,000).

The petitioner said that on June 13, he took the cap to the PC’s laundry shop in DHA Phase I for dry cleaning. The staff told him to collect the cap on June 14.

Ahmed said that he visited the shop the next day but the staff told him that he would have to wait for three more days. He visited the shop after three days but the laundry staff sought more time. Ahmed said that he last visited the shop on July 3 and demanded his cap but the staff told him that they had lost it and that their efforts to find it had been unsuccessful.

Ahmed said that the staff had provided substandard service.

He prayed the court to direct the respondent to pay him Rs25,000 (the price of the cap) and Rs200,000 damages.

The laundry shop’s manager Muhammad Imtiaz told The Express Tribune that they had not lost the cap. It had in fact gotten slightly damaged during the dry cleaning process.

He said that they had offered to pay the petitioner five times the amount he had paid for the dry cleaning, but Ahmed had refused to accept the amount, saying that the cap was worth a lot more.

He said that the cap was at their shop and that they could not pay him compensation in excess of five times the amount he had paid.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 14^th, 2013.