How Detriment Works

Detriment is a way to express the present or the potential negative consequence of an action, product, service, or business agreement. The term applies to many areas including, but not limited to consumer health and lifestyle, business, and law. In a way, detriment and benefit go in conjunction to measure your satisfaction as a consumer and how your actions would be unfavorable or advantageous.

The term detrimental effects typically accompany a warning. Typically, you'll find it embedded in articles about healthy lifestyles. For example, prenatal exposure to alcohol or smoking during pregnancy may have detrimental effects on the fetus. Also, radiation is proven to have detrimental or negative effects on the human body in both the short-term (shortness of breath) and long-term (tumors).

Organizations can list possible detriments in their plan for preventive measures, illustrating what might be harmful or profitable to their operations.

Real-World Example of Detriment

Recent studies register the highest number of issues in the cellular phone services market and the highest recovery level from consumer detriment in the clothing market. In recent news, there are plenty of instances where detrimental behavioral and social patterns apply as a description of the struggles many nations are facing:

Women are experiencing detrimental job layoffs due to the pandemic reported by UN Women in September 2020.

School closures are proven to be detrimental to learning and our children.

"No detriment approach" across the universities in the United Kingdom, which attempt to rise above the Covid-19 crisis, but fight to be as engaging to students forced to study online as before.

Publications on artificial intelligence evolving and its beneficial and detrimental consequences.

Substantial Detriment vs. Customer Detriment

You might encounter the term substantial detriment in a variety of legal articles. It can either mean when a business has unfortunate outcomes from operations, procedures, property, or finances. It's also a term for when any business element or its ownership is sold or disposed of.

You may come across the term substantial detriment when browsing through documents, such as contracts and treaties, that explain possible downsides of not applying a provision or breaking the agreement. An explanation of detriments may also supplement a benefits section, which is detailed clarification provided to avoid potential concerns about the nature of the deal. Promissory estoppels protect you from detriments, which serve to facilitate an injured party to recover when a promise hasn't been followed upon. If you, as a promisee, have relied on a promise and have suffered a detriment, you may claim that the court rectifies your losses.

On the other hand, personal consumer detriment specifically illustrates the damage that occurs when you buy a good or service of either low quality or high price. Marketing experts measure it by considering factors like your limited consumer options, lack of business competition, and personal circumstances like no or inadequate credit to explain the exposure you have to uninformed choices. Then, they evaluate the costs you may incur when repairing the good, the time you spend to fix it, including phone time used for waiting for a customer service representative, and so on.