Food & Drink Should I feel Guilty?

Easily. The reference to keeping unsolicited goods was in response to a common scam: send boxed item to random addresses, wait a month, send invoice for boxed item at an usurious rate. Oh, you threw away the box and/or the item? Pay the invoice or we'll take you to court. Cha-ching!

Goods sent by mistake, though? You don't get an invoice a month later, you get a message the next day saying "whoops, we effed up - can we have our item back, please?" Alternatively, you were honest and rang the company to let 'em know they effed up - which, by the way, you're legally obliged to do.

In short:
1) Dodgy company sends you an item you didn't request followed by an invoice: keep item, tell 'em to go forth and multiply.
2) Dodgy company sends you an item you didn't request, you ring 'em and they ask for payment: refuse, tell them to collect the item at your convenience or you'll consider it a gift.
3) You order Item A from a company, but get Item B: ring 'em, get them to collect Item B and supply Item A.
4) You order Items A, B and C from a company, but get Item D as well: ring 'em, get them to collect Item D.
5) A company gets the address wrong and sends someone else's items to you: ring 'em, get them to collect said items.

The law is clear in this: you get the "keep it and tell 'em to eff off" option only if the company sent you the item deliberately and in full knowledge that you hadn't ordered it with a view to extorting money from you. If the company claims it was a mistake - whether they're telling the truth or not - then you have to give them the item back, although you can demand that they retrieve the item at their own expense and at a time convenient to you. The only one of the five scenarios above in which you could legitimately claim to be confused as to whether the items were unsolicited is Scenario 5, where no prior contract exists between you and the company.

See also: all those people who got a PS Vita from Zavvi when they'd ordered a Vita game, and thought that the Unsolicited Goods Act meant they could keep 'em. (Hint: it didn't, and they couldn't.)

EDIT: To put the above into the context of the original question, the items cannot be considered unsolicited as there exists a contract in which the buyer solicited goods from Asda; Asda made a mistake in the fulfilment of this contract by supplying additional goods meant for a different customer (Scenario 4 above.) As a result, by law the goods are mistakenly supplied and Asda must be informed and given the opportunity to collect them; they are not unsolicited. Chances are, however, if you did this Asda would thank you for letting 'em know and tell you to keep them anyway, as the cost of retrieval and disposal will likely be higher than writing them off.

 

Like any legal issue, you make the assumption based on exposing yourself to the least liability - which is to say, you contact the company to find out what's going on. If you don't, then you're in potential legal hot water - whereas the other way around, contacting the company when you didn't need to, exposes you to zero legal liability whatsoever. What you need to remember here is this: the Unsolicited Goods Act was not created to get people free stuff; it was created to make it uneconomical for dodgy companies to do the "send an item on spec and invoice for it later" scam, and should always be interpreted with that in mind.

Wouldn't wash. How likely is it that Asda would supply a customer with a substantial quantity of free gifts, of the type commonly ordered from their shop, without some form of notification - even a letter in the box saying "CONGRATURATION A WINNER IS YOU?" It's vanishingly unlikely, isn't it? No reasonable person could expect that the perishable items received were a gift, and any attempt to argue such in a court of law would end badly for the recipient.

So you got a card telling you they were gifts? Then it hardly relates to the above scenario, does it?

No, it isn't. First: if Ocado has a history of providing you with freebies, and an unordered item of similar value arrives in your next order without a card, it would be reasonable for you to believe it was another gift; that isn't the case with the OP. The OP received a bunch of stuff, £50s worth, far in excess of anything that would be a reasonable gift in relation to the order he had made, and it did not come on the back of a history of Asda making similarly-valued gifts - making it clear it was a mistake, not a freebie. Any other interpretation is a stretch at best and outright dishonesty at worst. Hell, even the OP knows it: the thread isn't titled "Should I feel Guilty?" 'cos he's secure in his belief that the items were gifts, is it?

Then, when the recipient is out of hospital, they would have to reimburse Zavvi for the cost of the Vita or face criminal prosecution. Again, there's absolutely no reasonable way to interpret the receipt of a £200 (at the time) games console on the back of an order for a £30 game than as a mistake.

The law is rarely clear-cut. If it were, we wouldn't need lawyers.

If you live in the UK, then you abide by its laws and the CAB's advice is sound; if you live outside the UK, you abide by your local laws and will need to seek advice from your regional equivalent.

 

Not quite: for something to be unsolicited, it has to be unsolicited. Here, a solicitation is defined as a request for goods or services. If you made a request for goods or services and received different or additional goods or services as part of the fulfilment of that solicitation, then they are not unsolicited but instead supplied in error. An item is only truly unsolicited if it arrives completely out of the blue with no solicitation having been made. In the cases of your examples, neither item was unsolicited: you had solicited a chassis and received two in the first case, and you had solicited goods from Asda but received extras in the second.

 

Why so flippant?

No, but really: understanding the law is a very important thing, and misunderstanding it - or, arguably worse, taking advice from someone who doesn't understand it - can get you into a whole world of hurt. The law is Ser'ous Bidness, and deserves to be treated as such. Sure, in this instance the chances of Asda even noticing - much less taking the OP to court over the matter - is tiny, but plant that seed and who knows what'll happen tomorrow? A criminal record for theft the next time Zavvi sends out Vitas by mistake, perhaps? 'Cos that could totally happen, as various people who stuck their ill-gotten Vitas on eBay as soon as they arrived "'cos it's their mistake, innit?" found out to their cost.

(No, I don't know that anyone got a criminal record in that particular case. I do know that they could have, and that Zavvi was free to use that threat to exhort the guilty parties to pay up.)

EDIT: Actually, here's a better example. Say you find a lottery ticket on an empty street. There's nobody around to ask if it belongs to them, so you pocket it. Later, you remember the ticket and check the numbers for a laugh. Woah, it's a winner - you're rich! I mean, it's not like anybody can do anything, right? You found the ticket fair and square. Finders keepers, possession is 9/10ths of the law, et cetera. Whoops: you're guilty of the crimes of theft by finding (for taking the original ticket) and fraud (for representing yourself as the original purchaser of said ticket in order to claim the prize.) Don't believe me? Talk to Michael and Amanda Stacey, who were both given an 11-month suspended sentence for fraud and ordered to pay back £15,000 of the £30,000 windfall to the ticket's original owner. They were lucky to keep a penny of it, too: the only reason they did was because they used the money to pay off debts, and to reclaim the whole amount would have left them severely in debt at a worse rate of interest so the court went easy on 'em.

 

Sorry to hear that. Hope you're feeling better soon!