Bad hairdo, you can drag salon to consumer court

BHOPAL: Mehak Agrawal, 19, wanted her hair to look like Hollywood celebrity Eva Mendes. With high hopes she walks into a well known salon of the city that specializes in celebrity haircuts. An anxious Mehak kept telling the staff to be careful about length of hair. She was asked not to be worried. Few minutes of scissors work and she found horribly chopped off locks that barely reached her shoulders .
Enraged by negligence of the salon, she dragged them to the consumer court.
Gone are the days when you would sit singing the blues after getting a bad haircut that would have cost you an arm and a leg, but also spoil your looks.
With increasing awareness among masses about their consumer rights, people like Mehak are not hesitating dragging even hair dressers to consumer court.
It is not only about hair cut. Foram Mehta, 22, went to a renowned beauty salon at Bittan Market to get herself pampered with some beauty services, salon staff asked Foram for her customer card through which one can avail discount but he found her name in card is mentioned as "Forum", a mistake committed by the salon staff while issuing the card during her last visit. As the name was wrongly spelled, they refused to provide her discount.
She asked the staff to correct the name. But they refused .When the salon did not rectify their error, Foram went ahead filing a complaint at the consumer court.
The case is in the district consumer court.
There seems to be some awakening among consumers as complaints have also started coming in against burgeoning coaching classes. Many of them claim to have faculty from best backgrounds and institutes, not everything they promise is true.
When Girish Verma,19, a resident of Satna enrolled himself at a coaching class in MP Nagar. His parents mortgaged their shop to deposit Rs 45,000 as advance fees. Soon, Girish realized that the coaching is not up to the mark and claims made by coaching institute were false. When parents demanded for refund of the heavy fees, coaching class management declined to refund.
Girish soon found that he is not the only one felt cheated by advertisement and tall claims of the institute. Soon he found others who shared the same view about the class. United, they moved the consumer court.
"There has been a paradigm shift in mind-set of consumers who earlier chose to refrain from practicing their consumer rights in order to evade legal procedures," said Sadhna Pathak, advocate, consumer court.