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Jeff Licquia writes of a lesson he learned after some problems (thankfully resolved) with tires he bought at Sam’s Club:
Nevertheless, as a lesson hard won, it bears repeating: do not buy anything from club stores that you foresee needing ongoing customer support for, including automotive parts, computers and other electronics, or anything else where warranty support is important to you.
It seems to me that he omits the caveat “if you don’t plan on keeping your membership through the warranty period.” Given the extremely generous Costco and Sam’s return policies on most goods, maintaining one’s membership would seem to be a relatively inexpensive insurance policy.
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1 comment:
Well, sort of.
What got me was that standard warrantability and fitness guarantees—the kind you get from most stores just by buying through them—seem to be contingent on the payment of a membership fee (at least at Sam’s). Had I bought through just about any other store, I wouldn’t have had a problem had there been a defect in the tire. Sam’s, however, refused to even look at the tire, whatever the problem might have been. And since the tires sold there are Sam’s exclusives, I couldn’t just hop over to a competitor to get my warranty work.
That’s what prompted my post and my advisory: my expectation, which proved to be wrong, that stores which sell me defective merchandise will make good on the sale without making me pay for the privilege. Lots of people, I think, expect this behavior from stores, and if they’re not going to get it, they should be warned.