Eh, there’s the legal concept of someone being an agent of the company. It wasn’t typically expected to take orders, nor was it tied into the order system it seems.
In the cases where the deal had to be honored, the bot had the ability to actually generate and place an order, and that was one of the primary things it did. The two cases that come to mind are a car dealership and an airline, where you could use it to actually place a vehicle order ornto find and buy flights.
As agents of the business, if they make a preposterous deal you’re stuck with it.
A distinction can be made to stores where the person who comes up and offers to help you isn’t an agent of the business. They can use the sales computer to find the price, and they can look for a discount, but they can’t actually adjust the order price without a manager coming over to enter a code and do it.
In this case it sounds like someone did the equivalent of going to a best buy and talking to the person who helps you find the video games trying to get them to say something discount code-ish. Once they did, they said they wanted to redeem that coupon and threatened to sue.
It really hinges on if it was tied to the ordering system or not.












Your first part is fair, but your second part is a bit misleading. We sent troops, just not until people were convinced that it was an “us” problem too. People didn’t want to get tangled up in another one of Europes wars. Much like how most of the allies also didn’t get involved until they got threatened too. Except the soviet’s, who had an alliance with them.
It’s not like providing the materials needed to actually survive is nothing. Our entire economy was repurposed around doing so. The repayment was because a massive “European problem” contingent thought a budget neutral requirement would keep us from helping. We worked out a system where we bought long term leases on land, and they used that cash to buy weapons from us. It was a shell game.
We got rich after the war because everyone else was rubble and we still had factories.