Of Schrödinger’s contract and ambiguous terms: when a website mistakenly lists designer trainers for €10, do their ambiguous terms and conditions apply?
In the famous thought experiment proposed by Erwin Schrödinger, a hypothetical cat in a box may be considered simultaneously to be both alive and dead as a result of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not have occurred. For reasons that will become obvious a little later in this post, I was reminded of this as I pondered an article by Conor Pope in the Irish Times last week, in which he reported that the upmarket Irish retail store Brown Thomas [BTs] cancelled online orders after it had mis-priced designer trainers at €10 instead of the usual €150. This is a common scenario. To take only two examples, in 2010, Arnotts, which is now part of the BT group, offered an online deal for €98 televisions which also turned out to be too good to be true; and, earlier this year, Morrison’s supermarket website mistakenly listed premium whisky for £2.50. In any event, this is how BTs responded on twitter to their mistaken overpricing:
…To our customers, please note we experienced a pricing error on our website this morning. Orders sold at an incorrect price will be cancelled as per our terms and conditions.
As the image (left) from Morrisons’ current website implies, someone must have mistakenly entered £2.50 instead of the intended £25.00. But Morrisons were able to play the get-out-of-jail-free card of Scotland’s minimum unit pricing 
Last month, the Daily Mail website ran a story under the headline: 
