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Posted by David Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Monday, December 27, 2010 at 16:59:49 :
In Reply to: Re: Waranty posted by Gordon Maney [208.126.138.206] on Monday, December 27, 2010 at 11:05:48 :
All tool companies probably have a lot of people bringing in tools that they obviously broke by abusing it -- putting a 4' cheater bar on a 1/2" ratchet, using a screwdriver as a cold chisel, or pounding on a wrench with a double-jack. It's pretty clear from looking at the tool that the guy broke it by severely abusing it. The trouble is how do you put that into legalese in a form that some pimply-faced clerk in the tool department can apply? You can't. So, the companies have to either stop offering true unconditional lifetime warranties, like Sears and SK appear to have done, or continue to make it unconditional, but jack the selling price of the tools up high enough to cover the fraudulent returns, like Snapon has done.
Basically the implied contract of honesty between the manufacturer and the customer has been broken. The customer can't count on the manufacturer to honor the warranty, and the manufacturer can't count on the customer to be reasonable about when it was his own fault that he broke it. Now neither party trusts the other, the manufacturers write a lot of weasel words into their warranties and customers will look for opportunities to get back at the company, as in Midas' "free rusted brake drum removal service".
I think this is partly the result of the anonymity of globalization. If I built something for you personally, and it didn't hold up like it should, and you came back to me with it, I would feel obligated to fix it for you regardless of any legalities. We'd both know the general meaning of "like it should". You wouldn't ask me to fix something when you knew it was your fault that you broke it, and I would know that since you used it properly and it broke anyway, I owe it to you to fix it. Nowadays, however, we don't know the people who make the stuff, and we rarely even know the people who sell it to us. We know the big-box stores don't care about us, so why should we care about them? So, people bring back tools that they broke through abuse, and the stores make it a policy to try to deny or divert any warranty claims just to see if maybe they can get away with it, rather like what insurance companies do.