When is a Warranty Not a Warranty?

sgoldhargmail.com wrote:
>>
>> Posted by: dr Date: Jan 23, 2008.
>>
>> Apple basically does the same thing. The only extend the warranty
>> by 60 days or so when they do a warranty repair or replacement.
>> Still buying Apple stuff?
>>
>
> I might have dropped Apple if they had any competition to speak of. I
> don't consider Windows a valid substitute.

What many people don't like to hear is that the public in general (a vast general as best I can tell) buy totally based on initial cost. Paying extra up front for a decent warranty doesn't work for most folks. Why do you think <www.dealmac.com> is so popular? When they say somethings costs $435 "which is $8 under our last mention" I think why bother.

As long as initial price is what sells to the masses, poor service after the sale will be the norm.

And before everyone brings up Apple, people buy iPods as much due to them being cool and having the ITMS as much as anything else. If someone truly does come up with an alternative model or even a clone of the ITMS to go with their media player, Apple will likely have to start playing the low price game. To date they've been so far ahead of the curve they can avoid the game to some degree.

David Ross

On 1/27/08 at 11:17 PM, drdavidrossconsultant.com (David Ross) wrote:

>What many people don't like to hear is that the public in general (a
>vast general as best I can tell) buy totally based on initial cost.
>Paying extra up front for a decent warranty doesn't work for most
>folks. Why do you think <www.dealmac.com> is so popular? When they say
>somethings costs $435 "which is $8 under our last mention" I think why
>bother.
>
>As long as initial price is what sells to the masses, poor service
>after the sale will be the norm.

Exactly. Which is why I was so annoyed by the prior use of
'corporate welfare' in this context; I'm no fan of paying higher
prices to give corporations higher profits, but I've also worked
the other side of the line enough to know that service costs
money, and that has to come out of the company's margin. If
someone buys from a discounter that shaves margins to the bone,
they have to accept that. How is it 'corporate welfare' to note
that if a company makes $10 off an item but has to spend $15 on
over-and-above-the-call service to make the customer happy, that
means negative cash flow... and enough negative cash flow means
negative company, which is not really good for anyone -
including customers of the company who deserve the more
realistic level of support the company can give with its
margins. If you want $15 levels of service, you have to be
willing to either buy from companies that make $15 margins, or
be willing to pay for it separately after the fact.


Travis Butler
tbutlermac.com

> Posted by: dr Date: Jan 27, 2008.
>
> <snip>
> What many people don't like to hear is that the public in general
> (a vast general as best I can tell) buy totally based on initial
> cost. Paying extra up front for a decent warranty doesn't work for
> most folks. Why do you think <www.dealmac.com> is so popular? When
> they say somethings costs $435 "which is $8 under our last mention"
> I think why bother.
>
> As long as initial price is what sells to the masses, poor service
> after the sale will be the norm.
>

I would hardly put the blame on the masses here. Maybe it's a
generational thing, but I think the entire digital equipment market
is some kind of a racket -- I am amazed at how we all find it
acceptable to throw thousands of $ on machines with a useful life
span of about 3 years, that are likely to fall apart within that
short life span... An extended warranty of, say, $350 for a $2000 MBP
tells me that the equipment's basic price is actually $2350, because
unlike ordinary insurance that you buy with the expectation that you
won't use it, this one is extremely likely to be needed.

On 28-Jan-08, at 8:56 AM, sgoldhargmail.com wrote:

> I would hardly put the blame on the masses here. Maybe it's a
> generational thing, but I think the entire digital equipment market
> is some kind of a racket -- I am amazed at how we all find it
> acceptable to throw thousands of $ on machines with a useful life
> span of about 3 years, that are likely to fall apart within that
> short life span... An extended warranty of, say, $350 for a $2000 MBP
> tells me that the equipment's basic price is actually $2350

If you include warranty expenses, you are probably right, so unless
we can make more than $2350 in a year from increased productivity, or
indirectly from lower worker stress levels: we should not be buying
the new machine ? This has been said before; is it as simple as that ?

George

> Posted by: tbutler Date: Jan 28, 2008.
>
> <snip>
>
> How is it 'corporate welfare' to note
> that if a company makes $10 off an item but has to spend $15 on
> over-and-above-the-call service to make the customer happy, that
> means negative cash flow... and enough negative cash flow means
> negative company, which is not really good for anyone -
> including customers of the company who deserve the more
> realistic level of support the company can give with its
> margins. If you want $15 levels of service, you have to be
> willing to either buy from companies that make $15 margins, or
> be willing to pay for it separately after the fact.
>

I'm not sure how that works, given that the price of equipment is
almost the same everywhere, whether or not you get decent service. I
don't care about the $8 difference mentioned in the previous post or
even higher amounts. All I meant by corporate welfare is that it
takes two to tango. It's not optional for me to buy a computer, it's
part of how I make a living and I can't afford to live with a
defective machine anymore than the vendor can afford to take a loss
on it. In my particular example, I actually picked the company on the
basis of service (recommendations from others), and it was the
service -- the way things were handled -- that turned me off.

On Jan 29, 2008, at 10:33 AM, sgoldhargmail.com wrote:

> I'm not sure how that works, given that the price of equipment is
> almost the same everywhere, whether or not you get decent service. I
> don't care about the $8 difference mentioned in the previous post or
> even higher amounts. All I meant by corporate welfare is that it
> takes two to tango. It's not optional for me to buy a computer, it's
> part of how I make a living and I can't afford to live with a
> defective machine anymore than the vendor can afford to take a loss
> on it. In my particular example, I actually picked the company on the
> basis of service (recommendations from others), and it was the
> service -- the way things were handled -- that turned me off.

If you absolutely, positively have to have a drive right away on
failure, buy one before you need it.

With disks and seemingly lots of vendors, it's better not to do
warranty replacement anyhow, as you won't get the drive back or any
assurance that it will be properly disposed of so that the data can't
be retrieved.

Dave Winer had that problem with an Apple store (finally resolved with
email to Steve Jobs--clearly handled by a mail interceptor), and there
has been a recent problem report regarding a large retail chain in
which the drive "had to" go to Chicago for analysis, but was later
bought in a flea market in Florida (and returned to the original
owner) seemingly without ever touching Chicago.

    --John

When a product comes with "life time" warranty, whose life are they
talking about?

I don't mean to get off the subject but I've often wondered about it.

--
____________________
Ryoichi Morita
Coarsegold, CA
http://www.rjmorita.com

Ryoichi wonders...

> When a product comes with "life time" warranty, whose life are they
> talking about?

This is rarely spelled out, but the general intent is to repair the
product or provide a replacement if the product ever fails under
"normal" usage conditions. In some cases, the company specifies that
the warranty covers the lifespan of the model, so for example, if a
product is no longer made and parts for it are no longer available,
its life is over and it is no longer covered.

The technology industry doesn't have many lifetime warranties. :-) A
good example of a lifetime warranty is Lands' End, which will repair
or replace anything they sell, forever. They no longer make the shoes
that have worn out? They'll replace them with comparable shoes if
that's OK with you, or give you a full credit or refund of the price
you originally paid. Now THAT'S customer service!

  Mark H. Anbinder | mhatidbits.com
  Contributing Editor, TidBITS | http://www.tidbits.com/

On 30-Jan-08, at 1:18 PM, Ryoichi Morita wrote:

> When a product comes with "life time" warranty, whose life are they
> talking about?
>
> I don't mean to get off the subject but I've often wondered about it.

Whichever life is shorter,,,!

It could have been 'Whichever one is better,' but they don't Think
at All.

George

On 1/29/08 at 12:33 PM, sgoldhargmail.com wrote:

>>margins. If you want $15 levels of service, you have to be
>>willing to either buy from companies that make $15 margins, or
>>be willing to pay for it separately after the fact.
>>
>
>I'm not sure how that works, given that the price of equipment is
>almost the same everywhere, whether or not you get decent service. I

I'm honestly curious to hear how you class 'decent service' in
this context, then. Because what I see is a very dramatic
dichotomy between the service at a discount retailer like Best
Buy, and an Apple store, for example; you pay full price for
everything at the Apple Store, especially the peripherals and
add-ons like iPod cases that you see discounted elsewhere... but
you get things like the Genius Bar, free workshops, salesmen
that are generally many cuts above the usual retail drone, etc. etc.

>don't care about the $8 difference mentioned in the previous post or
>even higher amounts. All I meant by corporate welfare is that it
>takes two to tango. It's not optional for me to buy a computer, it's
>part of how I make a living and I can't afford to live with a
>defective machine anymore than the vendor can afford to take a loss
>on it. In my particular example, I actually picked the company on the
>basis of service (recommendations from others), and it was the
>service -- the way things were handled -- that turned me off.

John Baxter said it right in his own reply - if you are in a
mission-critical situation and cannot afford to be down, you
either need to have suitable backup equipment on hand (and buy
it if you don't already have it), or else buy a service contract
that guarantees the level of support you need. Because I don't
know of any mass-market equipment retailer or manufacturer who
will offer that kind of guaranteed service for nothing.

I mentioned APS before, so here's another example from when I
worked there: at one point, we used to offer 'unsecured
cross-ships,' which meant we would (without asking for a credit
card) ship a replacement drive out to a customer who really
needed it, without waiting for the defective drive to get back
to us. (They crossed in shipping, hence 'cross-ship'.) We
eventually had to stop that, not just because the shipping was
expensive, but because we were having too many losses from
customers taking advantage of us. (Shipping drives back that had
been obviously dropped from a height, our drive mechanism in
someone else's case, someone else's drive mechanism in our case
[which was a real killer, as drive manufacturers tracked sales
to VARs like us by serial number, and we couldn't send a drive
mechanism back to Quantum for repair/replacement if it had been
sold to LaCie or FWB], and even a *brick* in a couple of
memorable cases.) So one day, we had a customer call up and
demand a cross-ship. We explained politely why we had to stop
doing it, and offered to cross-ship if they would secure it with
a credit card. Customer said they could not afford to do that
and started getting verbally abusive, finishing with 'FWB didn't
treat me that way!' At the time, FWB was charging about $200
more than we were for the equivalent-sized drive; they could
afford to absorb the losses that we couldn't.


Travis Butler
tbutlermac.com

...Cats are the proof of a higher purpose to the universe.

At 13:18 -0800 2008.01.30, Ryoichi Morita wrote:
>When a product comes with "life time" warranty, whose life are they
>talking about?

I've always assumed it means the lifetime of the product. When the
product fails, it has reached the end of its lifetime, and therefore
the end of the warrenty.

Art Evans

At 6:15 PM -0800 1/30/08, Mark H. Anbinder wrote:
>The technology industry doesn't have many lifetime warranties. :-) A
>good example of a lifetime warranty is Lands' End, which will repair
>or replace anything they sell, forever. They no longer make the shoes
>that have worn out? They'll replace them with comparable shoes if
>that's OK with you, or give you a full credit or refund of the price
>you originally paid. Now THAT'S customer service!

STB backpacks is a good example for the computer industry.

I had a zipper fail on a bag of mine, and I emailed STB (in
Australia!), and they referred me to their "local rep", who lives
about three miles from me, who replaced my bag on the spot. A friend
of mine walked into their booth at Macworld this year with his bag,
showed the guy a problem, and had a new bag in about two minutes.

--
-- Marshall

Here's another ponder. When something is broken, isn't that the end of
it's life? Does this mean that technically, a lifetime warranty mean
it has a warranty until it breaks?

:-)


Jeff Pearson

Mark H. Anbinder wrote:
> Ryoichi wonders...
>
>> When a product comes with "life time" warranty, whose life are they
>> talking about?
>
> This is rarely spelled out, but the general intent is to repair the
> product or provide a replacement if the product ever fails under
> "normal" usage conditions. In some cases, the company specifies that
> the warranty covers the lifespan of the model, so for example, if a
> product is no longer made and parts for it are no longer available,
> its life is over and it is no longer covered.
>
> The technology industry doesn't have many lifetime warranties. :-) A
> good example of a lifetime warranty is Lands' End, which will repair
> or replace anything they sell, forever. They no longer make the shoes
> that have worn out? They'll replace them with comparable shoes if
> that's OK with you, or give you a full credit or refund of the price
> you originally paid. Now THAT'S customer service!

But you never see them bragging about their low low prices either.

David Ross

>> When a product comes with "life time" warranty, whose life are they
>> talking about?
>>
>> I don't mean to get off the subject but I've often wondered about it.
>
> Whichever life is shorter,,,!
>
> It could have been 'Whichever one is better,' but they don't Think
> at All.

i asked somebody about that once. i wanted to know if they meant the
life of whatever i was buying or my life.

nicky

At 4:54 AM -0800 1/31/08, I wrote:
>STB backpacks is a good example for the computer industry.
>
>I had a zipper fail on a bag of mine, and I emailed STB (in
>Australia!), and they referred me to their "local rep", who lives
>about three miles from me, who replaced my bag on the spot. A friend
>of mine walked into their booth at Macworld this year with his bag,
>showed the guy a problem, and had a new bag in about two minutes.

D'oh!

That's STM bags - not STB <http://www.stmbags.com>
--
-- Marshall

Reading the warranty couldn't hurt. (Except for the resulting
headache.)

For something I care about I do. And I often find that the warranty
is indeed for my lifetime; but is time limited if I transfer the
product to another.

   --John

> Posted by: tbutler Date: Jan 31, 2008>
>
> >I'm not sure how that works, given that the price of equipment is
> >almost the same everywhere, whether or not you get decent service. I
>
> I'm honestly curious to hear how you class 'decent service' in
> this context, then. Because what I see is a very dramatic
> dichotomy between the service at a discount retailer like Best
> Buy, and an Apple store, for example; you pay full price for
> everything at the Apple Store, especially the peripherals and
> add-ons like iPod cases that you see discounted elsewhere... but
> you get things like the Genius Bar, free workshops, salesmen
> that are generally many cuts above the usual retail drone, etc. etc.
>
My context was comparable prices + (my own) varied service experience
with resellers like Mac Connection, Small Dog, J&R, OWC, etc... which
I suppose are somewhere between Apple and Best Buy. I don't usually
try for discount retailers when buying electronic equipment, and I
have often bought, say, from MacConnection at a higher price than the
competition because they treated me well -- it's not an entirely well
defined term, but my comment was not entirely about practicalities --
I was just picking up a part of the thread about service vs. customer
loyalty -- it wasn't even about buying cheap, just an example of how
one really lousy experience for me meant I don't bother with that
vendor any more.

Same goes for the Apple stores, it's really not the "full-price" that
keeps me away -- I don't consider their service superior, maybe
because I'm in NYC where the crowds/lineups are insane and the Genius
bar guys are often too impatient for my taste. I also don't usually
seek sales advice on the floor and I view the free workshops as a
part of marketing, not service. (Isn't it a marketing strategy to
give something for free, whether product or information?)
> All I meant by corporate welfare is that it
> >takes two to tango. It's not optional for me to buy a computer, it's
> >part of how I make a living and I can't afford to live with a
> >defective machine anymore than the vendor can afford to take a loss
>
> John Baxter said it right in his own reply - if you are in a
> mission-critical situation and cannot afford to be down, you
> either need to have suitable backup equipment on hand (and buy
> it if you don't already have it), or else buy a service contract
> that guarantees the level of support you need. Because I don't
> know of any mass-market equipment retailer or manufacturer who
> will offer that kind of guaranteed service for nothing.
>
>
I realize "you get what you pay for" and there are all kinds of
things I could pay for in an effort to shield myself from lousy
experiences-- and maybe I'm not smart, or maybe I didn't feel it was
in my budget -- whatever it is, I was referring to an example where a
reputable vendor "treated me badly" (to keep within my abstract theme
here) while complaining that they didn't make enough money on the
sale to warrant doing this or that. So you could say the same about
the vendor, if they can't afford to give better service, they need to
revise their business model or find a more suitable business to be in.
> Customer said they could not afford to do that
> and started getting verbally abusive, finishing with 'FWB didn't
> treat me that way!' At the time, FWB was charging about $200
> more than we were for the equivalent-sized drive; they could
> afford to absorb the losses that we couldn't.
>
>
I realize that if you work on the other side, the overall picture
isn't nice. I've worked the other side myself at one time, and I
thought, too, that half the clients acted like spoiled brats as if
the company was Mom and Dad and owed them something, and as long as
they saved a couple of $ then the company could go bankrupt for all
they cared -- but that's not what the gist of my post was about.

In early 2001 I purchased a fancy computer bag (in denial of the dot com crash happening at the time). I bought it at a luggage store for $170+. Within a few months there was some fraying along a seam on the top of the bag where there was also a handle - an oversight in the design architecture of the bag was the cause. The bag came with a "lifetime warranty" but I didn't want to give up using the bag at the time. Later, I stitched up the fraying myself and kept using the bag. After a while I stopped using the bag. In 2006, I stitched in some durable fabric and started using the bag again. But some fraying started around the area where the harness attached in back. If that part failed, then the bag would be of no use to me. In January, 2007, I contacted the manufacturer by email. Within a day I got an email back asking if the bag had one of 2 logos (jpg samples in the email). It did. I got an email back telling me to send the bag in to them. In less than a week from the time I mailed the bag in, I received a brand new bag, a redesigned version of the original. The new bag listed on their web site for $249.95. The company was Swiss Army/Victorinox.

Mark H. Anbinder:
>
> Ideally, resellers like OWC would provide this sort of information,
> upon request if not right on their Web site. OWC, Amazon.com, Small
> Dog Electronics, and most other online resellers already tell
> customers how long a product's warranty lasts, as a matter of
> course. Why not provide typical warranty turnaround time? A customer
> relations manager at OWC says they'd never be able to keep up with
> frequent changes to such info, and publishing it would expose them
> to liability if it made a manufacturer unhappy. I'd prefer they
> focused on keeping the customer happy.

I have to say, on this point I completely agree with OWC. They could
not possibly keep up with that sort of information, and even if they
did, they could very easily lose vendors, or even have real liability
with this kind of information if it was not directly provided by the
manufacturer.

Just in your specific example, what if the second person at Hitachi
actually represents the normal procedure? Check a warehouse in the US
first and then ship from Singapore.

I appreciate the warning about Hitachi, but I think it is totally
unreasonable to expect the retail vendor to do anything about this.

(and no, I don't work in any sort of retail myself)