SEATTLE (Legal Newsline) – After tracking five years’ worth of alleged discounts at The Children’s Place, class action lawyers now will have to fight to keep their case in court.
The company on July 10 filed a motion to compel arbitration in Elaine Dougan’s lawsuit, in which she hopes to serve as lead plaintiff of a class action or as a private attorney general under Washington State law.
But Dougan enrolled in TCP’s My Place Rewards Program in 2018, before bringing the lawsuit. The terms and conditions of doing so feature a provision that requires any dispute to go to arbitration.
The terms on Dougan’s agreement state:
“PLEASE NOTE: THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS CONTAIN AN ARBITRATION CLAUSE AND CLASS ACTION WAIVER. THE WAIVER AFFECTS HOW DISPUTES WITH THE CHILDREN’S PLACE ARE RESOLVED. BY ACCEPTING THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS, YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THIS ARBITRATION PROVISION. PLEASE READ IT CAREFULLY.”
Dougan’s lawyers at Hattis & Lukacs say they’ve been monitoring the chain’s pricing since 2014. They say they have time-stamped screenshots of more than six million daily offerings for more than 53,000 products.
Their research “shows that The Children’s Place’s advertised website-wide ‘sale’ events and advertised percentage-off and dollar discounts were false, and that its list prices (i.e., reference prices) from which the discounts were calculated were false and inflated,” the lawsuit says.
“For the majority of its products, The Children’s Place never offered the products at the list price—not even for a single day. For the rest of its products, The Children’s Place very rarely offered the products at the list price (e.g., typically less than ten percent of the time).”