Increase your lifetime warranty



  • Didn't take a screen dump of this one, but when buying a Kingston SD card from eBuyer, they offered an option of an increased warranty. WTFs are:

    1. the card was under a £10; adding a 2-year warranty on top cost £15 
    2. Kingston memory has a lifetime warranty anyway
    So... why isn't there some flag that hides warranty offers for products that don't require them? Secondly... just how do they calculate those costs?

    Anyone in the industry care to comment?


  • I worked at OfficeMax. We called them "replacement plans", and they really were quite slick: they'd replace your product with an identical or nearly-identical one when it was damaged. The scheme was the same as mail-in rebates, in that it's priced assuming X% of people forget to actually send in the paperwork. I don't know how many people actually took advantage of the replacement plan, but I did it myself once and it was pretty painless. The replacement (a CD drive, to give you an idea of what era we're in) was a refurb, but considering the old one didn't work and the refurb did, I was happy with it.

    FWIW, while we were "scored" on how many warranties we sold, I would never have tried to pitch a $15 warranty on a $10 product. (Then again, when I worked there, memory cards were like $80, so I don't think the issue ever came up.)



  •  Best Buy's are pretty good too.  Returns are immediate, no questions asked, and if it's been too long to have the original product in stock (usually is), they give you a credit of the full purchase price towards a new product.

     Because of my plan, I traded in a dying 21 inch monitor for a 27 inch, and it cost me $10 - which is how much the dump would have charged me to dispose of the 21 inch monitor had I not had the plan.

     So basically I got a 27 inch monitor for only the cost of the warranty.  Yes, the 21 inch was still under manufacturer's warranty - but that warranty doesn't cover shipping costs to RMA the product, nor of course does it offer same-day replacement.  The extended warranty was faster and cheaper both.



  • Where do you get such a nice life time warrenty for expensive products? I never got a warrenty for more than a year.



  • Fine print: The lifetime in question is the lifetime of the product.



  • @ekolis said:

    Fine print: The lifetime in question is the lifetime of the product.

    Medical insurance for dead people!



  • @Ben L. said:

    Medical insurance for dead people!
     

    Since they'll have all those cheap clients, I'm sure rates can go down.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

     They won't ever hide the options because:

    1) It'd cost them money to try to program a rule to do so and

    2) A sucker might still buy that warranty, and if they didn't offer it to said sucker, that would cost them money

    As far as I can tell, all extended warranties are a scam, with the exception of the anecdotes and statistical anomalies that will be posted in response to this. And in response to this:

    For a while, getting the extended warranty on printers seemed to be a good deal. My father did a lot of full color printing. He bought a mid-range color printer, and the $15(?) warranty. Near the end of three years, it died like all printers do. Exchange for a brand new mid ranger printer, plus $15 for a new 3 year warranty. Continue for about a decade before some printer manufacture actually manufactured a printer that works.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

     They won't ever hide the options because:

    1) It'd cost them money to try to program a rule to do so and

    2) A sucker might still buy that warranty, and if they didn't offer it to said sucker, that would cost them money

    As far as I can tell, all extended warranties are a scam, with the exception of the anecdotes and statistical anomalies that will be posted in response to this. And in response to this:

    For a while, getting the extended warranty on printers seemed to be a good deal. My father did a lot of full color printing. He bought a mid-range color printer, and the $15(?) warranty. Near the end of three years, it died like all printers do. Exchange for a brand new mid ranger printer, plus $15 for a new 3 year warranty. Continue for about a decade before some printer manufacture actually manufactured a printer that works.

    I would say partial scam.  It is only a scam to those who forget about it, which after several years tends to happen.  Also don't forget they factor in the chance that the item will break in 3 years.  I know with all my electronics they seem to be coded to know when this date is, because within a month after an extended warranty would have ended they start to get quirks or malfunctions.  So I personally never get an extended warranty and I normally replace my laptop every 3 years anyways.  My friend on the other hand is rather unlucky & abusive towards his laptops, so he always gets the best extended warranty he can.  With one laptop he estimates that the total amount of repairs done on it within its lifetime totalled 3x its orignal cost.



  •  it's indeed a scam. These plans aren't warranty at all, they're an insurance policy and have all the limits and restrictions of those as compared to a warranty plan. Also, depending on your jurisdiction, you might actually by law have warranty far exceeding what the warranty card that came with your product tells you you have. And for those things where it does appear worthwhile, the seller knows quite well that

    a) the vast majority of users will never have a valid claim (because the product is highly unlikely to develop a covered flaw before the "extended warranty" runs ou),

    b) the vast majority of people buying it will forget about having the coverage and/or lose the paperwork needed to actually make a claim and

    c) they unscrupulous ones count on the company issueing the coverage going out of business before any claims are likely to be issued (self liquidation, and just starting a new company every other year or so, or just economic reality, the one time I had such a plan the store I'd bought it was out of business when the product failed years later, there was no way to get it replaced)


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