Somehow, I am not surprised that this person's business is operating on a razor-thin margin, if the only way they can think to handle the fact that they can't afford to offer refunds or cancellations is to lie to the customer. As Alison points out, plenty of small businesses don't do refunds/cancellations, and they just say so. And can they not think of freaking Amazon.com's wording of "your order has already been processed and cannot be changed"?