Most Amazon-Owned Private Label Brands Have No Warranties | Hacker News Reader

Most Amazon-Owned Private Label Brands Have No Warranties

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115 pointsnwcs118 comments

Most amazon private label stuff is disposable, low cost, I-don't-need-a-warranty stuff.

They compete directly against no-brand or unknown-brand chinese imports.

Seriously, who cares about a warranty on a $6 thing? As long as it works when you get it, it will probably continue working.

Amazonbasics cables or camera tripod DOA? Amazon will ship you a replacement and you can send back the broken one.

By the way, all the amazon label clothing comes in bag already set up to repackage and return.

Ok, what about environmental considerations? This seems very inefficient.

Even if they had a warranty they'd just send you a replacement item and throw your old one away. What's the difference besides the money for the new one is coming out of your pocket instead of theirs?

I think the idea is that there would be an incentive for them to make the product last

The board: "What about it?"

I talked to a friend and he said the UPS store now throws all the individual returns from multiple customers into a single box and ships that back. So there's that.

Haha do you think Amazon makes their decisions based on the environment? Of course they don’t.

People who make returns aren't making a decision based on the environment either.

Have you seen the news on Sonos upgrade policy? They just throw away fully functioning devices.

Can't you just resell them instead of going through Sonos?

Yes, but if you want to get a 30% discount on your upgrade, Sonos requires you to brick the device by putting it into "recycle" mode.

You're mistaken about the price of items on AmazonEssentials. Some of these items can range to nearly $100 (though, admittedly most of it is clothing). If a $80 jacket (https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Essentials-Heavyweight-Peacoat...) I bought started falling apart in under a year, I'd like a warranty. I don't know about you.

No, I would not have high hopes for an $80 peacoat. If I bought that I would expect it to fail.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. A good peacoat will run you hundreds of dollars...

> this is the winter essential that will be a wardrobe staple for years to come

Amazon disagrees. I do too. $80 is a ton of money to spend on a coat. I would indeed expect multiple years of use. Either way, less than a year is unacceptable at any price.

Price is relative so I don't think there is much to compare. Where I live, $80 is enough to buy clothing to survive one whole season for 2 years.

Warranty and replacement may benefit from being tied down to income of the people in the area the product is sold. I am not sure how that would be possible.

I'm disappointed. I wanted to disagree and say "$80 is not a ton of money to spend on a coat, look at what a coat would have cost 25, 50 or 100 years ago", but the internet was not forthcoming.

I could get a coat that lasts years for $10 now and I could do the same 25 years ago. Same with a coat costing $80 or $1000. All those coats should last years. Any one of them that lasts under a year would be a scam, a piece of garbage that shouldn't be sold. Even at $1 that'd be true. I'm not sure what your point is at all.

My point is that $80 is not a ton of money to spend on a coat. Neither is it a ton of money to spend on shoes. But many people only intend to use their shoes or coat a single season. It's hard to say that only clothes that last years should be sold. But if I'm being sold a $10 coat or $10 pair of shoes,why should I expect it to last years? I should have paid more for better quality.

I can't speak to your hypothetical coat, but this coat is advertised to literally last many years so you are either arguing that it's fine for the seller to lie or you don't have an argument at all.

Also $80 might not be a lot of money to you, but it is a lot of money to most people in this world. So that's not an argument either. I can afford to buy a Lamborghini on impulse, so how come everyone can't afford one, is frankly a ludicrous argument, whether it applies o Lamborghinis or to coats.

I think there are two separate questions here:

1) $80 is truly not a ton of money for a peacoat. A peacoat by Sterlingwear of Boston (supplier of peacoats to the U.S. Navy) started at $140 in 2009 (I owned one, and it lasted 7 years). You can get cheaper peacoats, but Sterlingwear is made domestically and is considered by many to be the baseline standard for peacoats (not luxury, but still a quality product).

2) That said, I agree things should be made to last -- disposable peacoats at any price is wrong and wasteful. At least 2 winters is the absolute minimum.

I have never heard of a warranty for clothing unless you buy something very expensive.

> Seriously, who cares about a warranty on a $6 thing?

Just because you do not care doesn't mean it should apply to everyone.

My parents would definitely use a warranty on a $6 thing if it had one because they do not spend blindly all their money on one-time items that cost $6 each. Sorry but I have to disagree with your reasoning.

This is illegal in Australia due to consumer-protection laws that automatically apply. I wonder how Amazon is getting around this, because the agency that punishes vendors tends to come down like a ton of bricks if they get wind of this kind of behaviour...

or they just don't sell them?

Australian consumer rights exist independently of the warranty offered by the producer. My guess is that it's perfectly legal not to offer an explicit warranty (or one with very short duration), however, it is illegal to refuse refund/repair when reasonably requested. Crucially, the lack or expiry of an explicit warranty is not a valid defence -- it's about the product meeting quality expectations given its cost.

When I lived in New Zealand, there was a cellphone shop in Auckland that refused to warranty a Nexus 4 that broke (neither Google nor LG warranty this device, unless you buy it from the Google store). The shop refused to fix it because I had unlocked the bootloader and installed LineageOS. They then told me it would cost $12 to ship the phone back to me! People at work told me, "Don't let them get away with that. We have consumer protection laws."

I had to take them to a tribunal. It was like 2 hours for the first session, and they wanted a second one (another 1.5 hours). I made the argument that I can buy a Windows laptop and put Linux on it; showed stats how many people install Lineage, how the mobile data failed first, then the Wi-Fi, and then the phone refused to boot, which is an indication of hardware failure (not my software modifications).

I fucking hate that company. Hours wasted and the judge awarded me my $450.

What's really stupid? Why didn't Google/LG warranty the devices themselves? This should have been as simple as the company just shipping the device back to LG and shipping me a new one. Pushing the warranty down to the individual vendors to repair is fucking assassin.

That's a miserable story. I have used the Consumer Guarantees Act here numerous times, perhaps a couple per year. I have never been to a tribunal ever and am not aware of anyone who has, that is not a normal experience.

I had a Nexus 6p bootloop on me after about 14 months of use. Neither Google or Huawei would accept responsibility because my 1 year warranty just ran out! Fortunately I paid with a credit card that came with extended warranty feature so I called them and they returned back all my money once I provided the evidence of failure.

Not sure about Australia, but I know how the EU warranty works. It is not the manufacturer who is responsible, but the seller. So for example Apple offers 90 days warranty on purchases from third party stores and 2 years on purchases from Apple stores. In the case of Amazon, they have to offer 2 years on all items “sold by Amazon”.

In Australia the seller is obligated to remedy your problem. They can't punt you to the manufacturer. The buyer is allowed to seek out the manufacturer though, if they want to.

This is the relevant webpage: https://www.accc.gov.au/business/treating-customers-fairly/c...

In California, goods sold without express warranties have implied implied warranties of one year. If goods do have an express warranty, then the implied warranty is as short as the express warranty, but no less than 60 days.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....

"(c) The duration of the implied warranty of merchantability and where present the implied warranty of fitness shall be coextensive in duration with an express warranty which accompanies the consumer goods, provided the duration of the express warranty is reasonable; but in no event shall such implied warranty have a duration of less than 60 days nor more than one year following the sale of new consumer goods to a retail buyer. Where no duration for an express warranty is stated with respect to consumer goods, or parts thereof, the duration of the implied warranty shall be the maximum period prescribed above."

How does this deal with things like open source licenses which explicitly state there’s no warranty, expressed or implied?

Could it be based on a sale, thus products obtained for free have no warranty? There’s also the argument that with open source code you had the chance to verify it in advance and notice any flaws, thus by obtaining the software despite that you’re acknowledging the flaws are “features” of the software.

Remedies are only applicable to "Any buyer of consumer goods injured by a breach of the implied warranty".

I suppose software might count as a consumer good when sold in tangible form (e.g. a boxed copy of TurboTax), but you're not a 'buyer' when you get software for free. And IANAL but a software licence (what you pay for when you 'buy' software online) doesn't seem like a consumer good. And even if the licence were a consumer good, the licence probably won't malfunction.

As someone who both uses AWS professionally, and as a consumer of goods on Amazon.com, I'm really surprised by the dichotomy in quality. Perhaps I shouldn't be, and that's just how corporations are.

If AWS was as shaky as Amazon.com goods, nobody would use it.

AWS is quite literally a printing press for Amazon that prints it $$ and let's it devour other competitors in the retail eCommerce segment by selling at close to no margins. They need to keep the AWS quality decent because unlike their retail customers, corporations using them can vote with their wallet and/or possibly sue if there's any actual misselling

I think you mean figuratively

In informal usage, "literally" is used to provide emphasis. Literally, in this context, doesn't mean literally true. It's a figure of speech.

Example: You might've heard a phrase like "I was literally blown away by the response I got" (probably from a vlogger). Nobody in English would say, "I was figuratively blown away by the response I got", because it's obvious the person is speaking figuratively.

Here, literally is meant to emphasize just how effective AWS is acting analogously to the Treasury's money printing presses.

When there's a word with 2 meanings that are almost opposites of each other, that's confusing. I think it's good to avoid using words in confusing ways like that.

https://youtu.be/8Gv0H-vPoDc?t=163

Add this to the list of quirks of the English language.

And especially that world. “Literally” has also meant “figuratively” for over 150 years [https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-lite...]

I used to argue the other way too, then one day on a whim I looked it up. I was surprised.

I love Weird Al; but there's rarely confusion with the word "literally", else it would have fallen out of usage long ago.

When someone says "it's literally a printing press" about something that is obviously not a printing press, you know that they are using literally as it has been used for hundreds of years[0]: for strong emphasis.

[0]: https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/109061 definition 1c.

English is full of words and phrases that mean something different from their literal meaning. Another classic example is "I could care less."

Steven Pinker wrote about this in detail in The Language Instinct.

https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2007/01/i-could-care-less...

When someone says "I literally could care less", everyone listening knows what they mean. There is no confusion and no need to worry about whether they are literally correct.

This is just part of the fun and wonder of the English language.

The literal definition works fine.

Consider the related “it’s possible for me to care less” suggesting a preference exists, but it’s negligible. That’s generally how people mean “I could care less”. Which oddly enough means the literal difference between “I (could/couldn’t) care less.” is practically meaningless.

I'm not sure if you intentionally chose a phrase that's usually mistakenly used to also mean the opposite - and then add literally to it.

When I hear someone say "I could care less" when they mean "I couldn't care less" then I tend to understand that they value their words, language, and meaning less than I do mine. They're unintentionally signaling to me that what they're saying isn't necessarily what they mean, and so I factor that into my understanding of, belief in, and reliance upon, whatever they may say.

I am glad that you value words, language, and meaning. So do I.

But people who say "I could care less" are usually not mistaken. They know full well what they mean, and that the phrase seems to say the opposite of its literal meaning.

It's a great example of irony and sarcasm, both of which have a rich history in English, and probably in most languages.

Pinker has a fine discussion of the phrase in the book I mentioned. I can't do it justice here, but consider how the phrase is spoken. I will use italics to indicate emphasis:

I could care less.

Try saying that out loud a few times with emphasis on the italicized words. You may start to hear the ironic and sarcastic intent.

English would be a much poorer language if we could only use words and phrases in their most literal meaning.

Also consider the context. "I could care less" is used in casual speech, where it's perfectly OK to play with the language and have fun with it.

That is quite different from, say, a manual on how to operate a piece of machinery, or any other kind of technical documentation. There of course you want to be as clear, explicit, and unambiguous as possible.

But I wouldn't judge someone's ability to write a clear technical manual based on their enjoyment of irony in more casual speech or writing.

The average person I know who says "I could care less" would also say "For all intensive purposes".

They know what they mean, but they're not expressing some deep irony or sarcasm. They're just parroting back something they've heard someone else say-- incorrectly.

For all intensive purposes, it is best to use powerful tools and know how to use them. For less intensive purposes, you may get by with a Swiss Army knife.

But yeah, sometimes we just make a mistake.

Haven't we all uttered a malapropism at one time or another?

I love watching a flamingo dance!

I would not view someone's usage of colloquial usage of words/phrases (who's true meaning is widespread, even if the phrase is literally incorrect) as some deep statement on their personal views of words and language.

Most people don't think about linguistics regularly. Their ignorance on a topic doesn't mean they would or would not be passionate about it, had they known more.

This is literally the dumbest thing to do with a word. I mean literally, not literally.

I understand that English is defined by those who speak it, not by committee, and that the colloquial use of the word "literally" as an intensifier is widespread. I still think the word "literally" is worth fighting for. It would be a pity to turn a word with such precise, significant, and unique meaning into yet another mediocre intensifier, of which we have dozens. In doing so, we would not merely add a definition, we would destroy the old one.

So, I'm with GP: the word "literally" doesn't fit the context and ought to be replaced.

"Literally" has been used in the contemporary colloquial sense since at least 1769[0].

[0]: https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/109061 definition 1c

Then it has been worth fighting for since at least 1769.

I think the battle has long been lost

This.

I'm all for treating language as the living thing it is. However, "literally" is a very useful word and there's noting else quite like it.

If "literally" can mean both literally and the exact opposite of literally, it becomes devoid of meaning.

In informal usage, "literally" is used to mean it's literal opposite "figuratively". Which I find literally demonstrative of human nature.

"Informal" tends to mean "wrong", "bastardised", or "misappropriated". So I think we're all actually on the same page.

What place does informal usage have in our speech, if only to be immediately corrected when it is used? When a commenter said, "No, you meant X", that statement in itself is wrong because the other poster intentionally used the colloquial definition.

people cite aws/amazon, there's also uber/vc that leverage massive funds to grow shaky business models without constraints.. how many others (if any, I'm genuinely curious)

Google Ads/EverythingElseAlphabet

For what its worth, Amazon Retail has been (or could be, depending on quarter) profitable on its own. It's certainly not a shaky business model, shaky margins maybe. Similarly, Uber is a sound business model (taxis exist for a while), just an unsound price point.

I don't know, Uber 'lets race to the bottom to kill everybody else' seems everything but sound.

Amazon is operating weirdly (random pricing now) even though it's true the financial side is probably normal.

Do we use the same AWS? The one where new features are half-baked, old features are still half-baked, and the only redeeming factor is convenience?

There are two "AWS". One consists of:

- EC2, including scaling groups (but crucially do not attempt to use them for auto-scaling)

- S3

- Route53

- RDS

- Redshift

- Maybe a few others I've forgotten or haven't used

They all have their flaws, but if you stay on the beaten path, they basically work most of the time.

Then there is the other AWS. It consists of all the other high level services you can pick from that enormous drop-down. I haven't tried many, but from my little experience and loaaaads of anecdotes from other people, _that_ AWS is largely unreliable rubbish.

That is to say, stick to the extremely common low-level or otherwise foundational stuff unless you love pain and disappointment.

I'd add a few to those. Fargate is remarkably trouble-free. ElastiCache is reasonably well-done Redis. SQS, EventBridge, and SNS are solid and unsurprising. Even DynamoDB is quite good so long as the implementor understands how to actually use it (most people don't, and instead just crank up the read units until AWS literally owns your company).

But the thrust of your point remains: when you get into the nonsense factory, when you're trying to bolt together the higher level integrated services, it becomes an exercise in self-inflicted stochastic violence.

Yes, if you stay on the beaten path, invest time in figuring out the subset of functionality that actually works, and tease out through experimentation its major quirks, the basic AWS services can be made to work fairly reliably. I stand by my description of this state of affairs as "half baked."

The true AWS advantage is that the boss can't get fired for choosing it so the individual contributors already have spending authority inside its walls. Unfortunately, that's a trump card.

“Can be made to work reliably” is disingenuous. It just does.

Reliability of AWS and GCP is one of their best features. Everyone just assumes Azure works as well as the others (spoiler alert: it doesn't).

The main reason you hear about so much Azure growth is because they give free credits to their software assurance customers. For everyone else, not work paying for it.

Didn't Microsoft migrate active directory into Azure so every enterprise client is on Azure?

No warranty, but you can probably use a pair of amazon basics underwear for a year and return it with free shipping for it being insert random reason from drop down menu.

Imagine if a car manufacturer offered unlimited halfway fraudulent returns, warranties would feel like a ripoff.

Will happen to Amazon what has happened to the other big techs assuming U.S. laws / principles could just be applied world-wide without taking local laws / principles into account.

Amazon is getting under the scrutiny it deserves, and it will lose some of its current competitive advantages by being forced, fairly or not, to (over) comply with local requirements.

Easiest card to play for countries trying to defend their historic, local players 'who pay their taxes in [insert country] and comply with its laws'.

>Amazon is getting under the scrutiny it deserves, and it will lose some of its current competitive advantages by being forced, fairly or not, to (over) comply with local requirements.

Forcing them to comply with warranty/consumer protection laws in a jurisdiction feels very fair when they're selling their own private label brands to customers in that jurisdiction.

Completely agree. What you describe, is fair. There is a law. They must comply.

What I had in mind is that countries will come up with unfair actions against Amazon. By unfair I mean that with regards to the actual action, not the general situation or the end outcome.

For instance, Airbnb or Uber, who are disrupting markets by flirting with legality in many cities, are often targeted by regulations aimed at them, specifically. These regulations are not always fair since their purpose is to reset, if not invert, a situation to help struggling local players.

The end goal is to have a fair market, but when fairness is about defending local, less competitive players at all cost then the regulation is unfair.

Maybe the word 'fair' is not exactly the right one. 'appropriate' might be better.

Requiring companies to obey the law? How rude. No-one is actually forcing them to sell this stuff, you know. If they want to sell it, they’ll have to follow the rules.

It feels that whenever it can, Amazon will hide behind its lack of control over its 3rd party vendors when something fishy is happening. To my knowledge selling counterfeit goods in the U.S. is illegal, yet this is a widespread issue on Amazon U.S.

So. Complying, OK but only when last resort!

NZ law doesn’t require return to manufacturer, it requires the seller to accept the return. NZ law also makes minimum warranty requirements so brand new goods can’t be sold “without warranty”.

Amazon tries to claim that it’s a “market place” and doesn’t actually sell things itself, but all that matters in NZ is who you have given your payment info to.

Same in Sweden. Seller is responsible and the warranty period is automatically three years.

If it doesn’t have a warranty and that it is an issue... don’t buy it. This is clickbait for all the local “amazon sucks” folks who will retell that one time they ordered counterfeit toilet paper or the one time the amazon delivery driver threw their package over the fence and now all of amazon sucks and so does the rest of modern retail and we should go back to trading sticks and stones for our lofi dumbphones...

Do they need warranties? Doesn't Amazon have a return anything, anytime policy? I thought I read stories about people just buying stuff, using it, and returning it years later after it's worn out for a refund or replacement. I think I heard this in one of the many Amazon returns mystery box videos on YouTube.

If the item is still available, it is possible to purchase it again, and return the broken item during the 30 day return window of the new purchase.

So, a 30 day warranty.

I guess that's better than 0 days, but barely.

No, better than that. If it fails 90-180+ days, you can still re-buy & return defective one.

No it's an infinite warranty - every time it breaks, buy it again, return the bad one.

Infinite as long as they keep making it.

So, they constantly switch the exact SKU for the item they’re selling and reject your return because it’s not the same SKU as the other one and make you pay for both.

That’s where this practice will lead.

Possible, but Amazon eventually bans for enough returns, so that isn't a great solution.

I've had them send me a defective item 4x in a row before, only getting it right on attempt #5.

I doubt they'll ban you as long as you're honest and behave well. Many products they sell can be sketchy in quality, and I'd bet they are aware of what can go wrong.

I've returned a lot of stuff for valid reasons (mainly shipping damage) and I've never been banned.

My wife has returned 166 items in the last 12 months with no issues

How on earth do you get to that level of returns? I use Amazon a lot and I'm pretty sure I don't order that many things over the course of a year.

Maybe clothes?

I imagine you're correct. Especially with shoes, lots of people order multiple pairs to try on like they would in a store. Zappos, which Amazon owns, even encourages the practice I believe.

Why not just go to a store at that point? It would be less hassle...unless there is a specific bulk option for trial, that is so much waste and not very environment friendly.

The only times I have returned a thing is when it came broken or was radically different than advertised. If the cost of shipping, environment and combined wasted time of everyone involved is higher than the 70% price of the product, then I will put it in the store room or donate it away at some point later.

You're assuming three things:

1) There is a store that sells the products you want

2) The store is close enough to your house to get to without it being inconvenient

3) The store carries a range of sizes appropriate to be able to try.

If you are an "unusual" size (large, small, tall - effectively anything but average for the area in which you live), attempting to try a range of items in a store generally means _the store_ ordering them and having to visit twice.

Amazon advertises "Free Returns" on the item page (if it qualifies). So it seems like they are encouraging purchases (and easy returns if you are not satisfied with your purchase).

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

> Amazon.com offers free returns on most items delivered to an address in the 50 United States. Look for “Free returns” next to the price to confirm that the item qualifies for free returns.

In the US, getting banned from Amazon would be a minor inconvenience at worst. Target, Walmart, Best Buy, Wayfair, BB&B, Overstock, and a few other sites replicate the useful portion of Amazon's catolog in its entirety, several times over. They also rarely cost more.

Ordering from a bunch of different places with variances in shipping seems like a lot more work to me. And I'm guessing those places don't carry the unusual or oddball stuff. You can add eBay I guess.

Getting banned wouldn't be the end of the world but it would be inconvenient for a lot of people.

Walmart.com is very similar to Amazon. It has plenty of no-brand Chinese stuff. Amazon hasn't been the only seller of anything in a long time, and how much of each person's history is oddball anyway?

Also, those places all offer 2-day shipping. Most are moving toward same-day because their inventory is already deployed everywhere.

This is definitely fraud, yeah?

I wonder if they have fraud detection for this kinda thing. Or if it's just not worth the expense for most things.

Fraud requires mens rea. They are going to have to have a hell of a time proving mens rea when the local law expressly allows a consumer to exchange a defective product in the time limit when the supposed fraud happened. Ethical or not it's expressly not criminal.

The old two wrongs make a right defense. I have a feeling this will be as successful in court as it was against my mom when I was 6 years old.

>The old two wrongs make a right defense.

Where the hell did you get that from my comment?

I'm saying that no prosecutor is going to take a fraud case where the fact pattern is of a consumer manipulating a return system in order to achieve an outcome that was identical to one expressly allowed by their state law (return or exchange for non-defective example within 90 days).

If a store overcharged you $5, are you allowed to break into the store after it closes to steal your $5 back? Because that seems to be your argument that you are justified in breaking the law as long as it returns you to some natural state of evenness.

> Fraud requires mens rea

You mean like saying you're going to return one item (the one amazon just sent you and the one you clicked on with the shipping date) and actually sending another (one you bought two years ago)? I think it'd be pretty easy to prove, tbh.

That's not what I was referring to anyways. They almost certainly wouldn't go to court for a $50 backpack, but they can definitely bar you from using the service if they think you're going to cost them more money than you give.

Amazon support specifically recommended this approach to me when I was outside the return window.

I don't doubt a rep told you this. My question would be: Is this their policy, or something the rep figured out to make customers stop complaining?

This is a case that is not specifically addressed by Amazon's return policy. As is the case with any return, all they really care about is that the item number of the item being returned is the same as the item number on the order they are crediting. Consider the following scenario:

I buy 2 widgets from Amazon, and 2 of the same model widgets from Best Buy. I line up all 4 widgets to test and find that 2 widgets are broken. I have no idea which store the broken widgets came from since they are all identical. I return them to Amazon because it is more convenient. It is quite possible that I returned the Best Buy widgets to Amazon.

You can also send bricks back and they will send the brick to the next buyer. [0]

[0] I don't recommend this.

If you make too many returns, they shut down your account.

There are legal implicit warranties. Manufacturers like to reduce your rights by offering limited warranties. This is why they want you to sign the card and send them in to register because it helps them.

Not in the way you seem to be meaning it. There is an implied warranty of merchantability, but that's not a consumer warranty.

Warranty of Merchantability mainly means that the seller must abide by any contract terms and that the product should match any claims or specs on the packaging.

Statutory warranties.

For brands selling on Amazon (not Amazon owned) warranty registration is one of the best ways of getting the customer on your list - as Amazon does not share customer's email addresses with their vendors

This isn't very helpful info without knowing what the item is (I didn't see the article specify this). I mean, if I'm buying a cheap pair of underwear and I can return it within 30 days if it has any initial problems, then I'm 100% fine with no warranty. The chances of me using it are basically zero anyway.

The movie tommy boy has a great scene about guarantees/warranties. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEB7WbTTlu4

Warranties these days are shit anyway. You have to jump through a million hoops to get anything and they often are "pro rated" over the time period so they decay over time.

Pro-rated warranties aren't necessarily bad - it's too short warranties that are bad.

e.g. Costco's warranty on car batteries in Canada is 100% for four years, 50% for the next 1.5, 25% for the next 2.8 years, (100 months total warranty) and claiming the warranty is just a matter of bringing your battery to the returns counter.

If they are sold in EU warranty is a legal requirement. Sooner or later this will get them in trouble.

Does consumer protection legislation not impose minimum standards?

Are those items sold in Europe too ? By law there is a two years long warranty on item sold in EU, no matter what

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