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Comment by 2muchcoffeeman | Hacker News Reader

I used to abuse new iPhones, and before the warranty ran out claim that the battery life was not up to scratch. They always replaced my phone. Once I got a new phone when the damage was clearly my fault but I played dumb anyway.

I am still buying Apple products. So jokes on me.

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I've been on the other side: Dealing with returns and warranty claims at scale, albeit at a much larger company.

You're not alone. A lot of people will invest a lot of time into lying, playing dumb, making threats (think people with a lot of Twitter followers threatening to broadcast how terrible your company is unless you give them exactly what they want) and other manipulative tactics to abuse warranty claims.

Ultimately this is why we had to become more strict about warranty claims. When half of your warranty claims are coming from people angling for free upgrades or demanding full-price refunds after many years of service (some of whom tried to demand to keep the hardware and get a refund), you quickly become numb to it. I guess companies like Apple can absorb the lies for a while, but eventually you have to make a choice between padding your margins to cater to the warranty abusers or becoming more strict on warranty claims.

The author's point is that he was careful and the request for warranty repair was not some abuse attempt. Of course deceitful demands for warranty should be declined. Even Apple will not honor warranties in cases of obvious abuse and lies.

Apple understands something many retailers have lost. The way you deal with the customer when they’re not happy turns you into a lifetime customer. And if it doesn’t it’s a small price to pay.

Costco, Nordstrom, Marine Layer, etc.

To me this is a winning strategy. Even if it’s 1 in 5 or less.

It's a winning strategy for high-margin luxury goods, not for everything.

If that one warranty-abusing user convinces 2-3 others to buy the same product and they don't abuse the warranty, the company is still making more money.

It comes down to margin. In a commodity business like Android phones or TVs the margins are razor thin. With a 10% profit margin you’d need to convince 10 other buyers just to break even on one fraudulent replacement. The real difference is Apple has some of the best profit margins in the industry.

Yeah I remember one customer with multiple destroyed tv's (spilled beer or other moisture damage, panels had rust) getting them repaired on samsungs dime because they ware "the voice of the customer".

It was annoying, but we did bill samsung for all the work. :)

The blogs author might also like the fact that samsung owns their warranty repair infrastructure, they don't contract it out. So less repairs means more profit. While contractors repair everything that is not obviously deliberate.

...and that's why companies that don't have Apple's generous profit margins have to be extra careful with their return policies. Or, more generally: this is why we can't have nice things.

> I used to abuse new iPhones, and before the warranty ran out claim that the battery life was not up to scratch.

Oh, so, fraud.

Nope. They have a utility to test the battery capacity. They check your claim first and someone decides.

I’d imagine someone decides either based on the results of the tests not aligning with expectations (in which case —- cool), or because they’d rather not come out to a customer with a hard ‘no’ on a replacement, and essentially comp it as a courtesy. I wonder if in your case it’s simply been the latter.

Retail is hard. Perhaps less hard for Apple, but I wonder to what extent the retail store employees end up paying for stuff like this.

In a previous life I worked at a Sears. Back when that was a thing.

I was in lawn and garden during springtime. People would come in and buy a fully loaded top of the line lawn tractor. A week later it would be back, covered in mud and grass clippings, clearly having been through hell. Inevitably they were not happy with it. Probably because their pasture was now mowed.

I moved to electronics in the winter. Same story around the Super Bowl but this time big screen TVs.

It was easy to tell. Customers who just went straight to the big ticket item without any questions were obviously not interested in a long term purchase. But we just ate it.

The shitty thing was I got paid commission. Those returns got clawed back in my next paycheck.

I think Apple at least has the decency to pay their retail employees hourly.

WOW. Thank for the tip! I will also do the same and abuse warranty to get new devices.

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