Grey background on clothes prims?

Using newbie non-tech talk here:
I'm told that a while back, all clothing prims had grey backgrounds, but then SL changed how such things appear and the prims had to be changed to have a white background in order for them to match the rest of the outfit (such as prim flares on a pair of jeans). I spent some lindens at a particular higher-end store and ended up with mismatched prims, and though the designer sent me new prims for that particular outfit, I was told that other merchandise there has that issue and it's my job to fix them if I buy them (such as a no-copy skirt that I want to buy but it's not cheap so I've just got it on my "wish list". When I asked why they don't fix the clothes, they said they don't have time.

I know, in theory, anyway, how to fix the problem now, but if I weren't the type to get right in there and ask a lot of questions, I would have either thrown the original outfit out or would be wearing it with mismatched prims (which looks bad on jeans...dark flares on light jeans). I understand sizing problems, and have slowly been learning how to resize clothes, but this problem is different.

I wondered what people who have been here longer than I think of this situation. IMO it's defective merchandise, but I'm just a newbie and need perspective.

Bad customer service.

"Don't have time" to fix known problems in a product? Close the shop until they do.

They told me it would be to my benefit to learn how to address such "trivial" concerns myself so that when I buy grey-backgrounded prims from other vendors I can fix them.

It wasn't a hard fix, but it was oh-so-time consuming. I went thru everything I sold, repaired and replaced the prim parts....ech. Of course some things I had greyed down a bit in PSP, meaning that for those, the texture needed to be redone and reuploaded. A few things I just couldn't get to look right at all, and I pulled those off the shelves. I don't have a large store, and it was smaller then, but it still took me a whole weekend to do it all (and I'm not talking about a few hours here and there). I can see why someone might not want to go to all the trouble especially if they had a huge inventory in their stores, doesn't make it right but I can almost understand it.

While the statement is sound, the wording is horrible. You will run across a few things where the designer may be gone from SL or for whatever reason no longer logs on.

It is just cutting corners. They should have fixed their problem pieces the same way everyone else had to.

I believe I know what you're talking about. So far as I know, the case was that the SL avatar itself - the "shape" beneath your skin - was grey shaded; so when your skin and clothes were baked over it, they appeared a certain way. Thus when prim attachments were made using the same exact texture as the clothing, they would not look exactly the same unless you set the prim's color to that shade of grey also.

Then at some point, with some release or other, SL made the avatar white-shaded. This of course changed the way skins and clothing looked on it, and it's why the prim parts of the clothing are once again mismatched.

I'm not sure I would fuss about having to change the shade of the prims as a customer; I fiddle with the shade of new clothes often. And maybe it's a little unreasonable to ask a clothing maker to go through dozens, perhaps hundreds of vendors and manually re-edit them. I suppose a generic notecard explaining the situation could be dropped into all the vendors with less effort, though, so the less-experienced will understand the problem and know how to correct it.

TY for the explanation, Dakota. This store is more like a boutique...she doesn't have that much inventory, and much of it is new and therefore doesn't need to be fixed. So I can't understand why she would sell, right alongside the new stuff, older stuff that was never fixed.

So we aren't talking about a massive warehouse store like Bare Rose.

I had thought of the notecard idea, too. It would have been nice. I still would have been a little disappointed, but I would have known what was going on. As it was, I spent time camming the outfit while wearing it and thinking, "Is this me? Is it my viewer? Is it my lighting setting? What is wrong?"

Thanks to everyone for validating my reaction.

Smart clothing creators used the same texture, and applied a tint to the prim parts. Check to see if there's a grey tint/color in the texture tab when editing the prims. It may be that changing that to white will fix the problem.