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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

The way they do warranty is really awesome and uncomplicated.

Recently I had a set of headphones fail after ~1 year and all I had to do was find the item in my order history click a button, answer a few questions and in this case they just credited the amount to my account, didn't even have to send them back. Instructions told me to recycle them.

There is a certain amount of trust in the system.

However it can also go wrong. Once I sent a GPU for repair because a fan stopped working and it was still under warranty. Sadly they or their repair center marked it as a no fix, recycled the card and I was credited the amount I paid, sadly that was during the GPU crunch and a card that had similar performance was not available for even close that price. Replacing a fan I could have done my self but I thought a warranty claim would be the correct thing to do incase something else breaks.

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> a certain amount of trust in the system

Switzerland operates on trust. You go to the car service, you get the work done, you leave, you'll receive a bill in the mail later. There is trust that they do the right work and not overcharge you, and there is trust that you'll pay.

Go to an unoccupied mountain hut, drink the beer, eat the food, use the wood for the stove, use the med kit (better to leave the morphine...), sleep in the beds, take some of the local cheese, and then leave your payment in the cookie tin, using the other few hundred CHF already there to make change.

Just be sure to mark everything in the ledger, so the hut warden can replace it easier.

Amazingly enough this can happen in the US as well. About 15 years ago I went to a sleepy little town in Northern California (might have been near Novato), where there was a used bookstore with nobody working. You pay what you think the book is worth, and just put your money in the tin by the door. Wonder if that bookstore is still around.

That’s how grocery stores work now.

We have one such local produce shop in our village in western Switzerland. Nobody around, there is scale, you can pay digitally by Twint (or leave cash). Tons of farms around have ie chicken eggs or wine grapes or other products with (weather-proof) tin box (or QR code sticker for Twint) and scale for weighting, nobody around and you just go and take what you want.

Then I go home to eastern Europe (we call it central Europe back home, lol nobody wants to be branded as east European since it reeks of russian association which for a long time means something very negative) and kleptocracy is visible literally everywhere on all levels of society, its nauseating beyond any tolerance from me... Its impossible for me to accept it once I've experienced much better society. One of the reasons to never move back and not raise kids back there, even if whole family is far (which is not always a bad thing).

In NZ and Australia I really enjoyed the farmers selling items along the road in little boxes. Carrots, fruit, etc. All on the honor system.

That’s also a thing in rural Germany.

it's also a thing in Santa Cruz, CA

Yup also common in the Midwestern US

Also a thing in parts of rural England. I have a walking route that takes me via ~12 of these stalls because they are the ones that sell local Honey. All are money-in-the-tin operations.

Considering how many of my Balkan countrymen moved there I doubt this works.

Switzerland is pretty effective at assimilating second generation migrants thanks to the dual education system. The kids of your countrymen are probably all in middle class jobs and raising a family.

Could you expand on the education system and how it helps assimilate second-generation migrants? Thanks.

They are only reachable by multiple hours hiking high up in the mountains. That's a lot of "work" just for the chance of a few hundred CHF.

Backpacker territory has a certain kind of trust.

Being that close to nature long enough does things to a person. It's outside of something easily described with any human words.

That was nicely described. I can totally understand it. Never thought about it that way :)

This is true - hikers are usually self selecting that way. But the sentiment doesn't hold in general I'd say.

I've experienced this even in French mountain huts, during winter there is no guardian and usually only part of the hut is available for whoever comes. Use fuel, any other material, leave some money behind. Everybody chipped in. Pretty good to keep them running long term, it ain't easy or well paid job.

This is not unique to Switzerland, it's pretty common for remote areas across the continent from Scandinavia to Kamchatka. I've been hiking in the Baikal taiga, and it's pretty common for local hunters and travelers to leave money if you can't refill the hut with supplies.

I’d really like to experience this. Is this something I could do on a week-long hiking trip? Where can I get more info?

Is this a thing? People do that?

Sure, many cabins operate on a honor code. People hiking in this harsh environment respect the hospitality. If you don't have that kind of respect around the mountains, you won't fathom going there anyway.

And yeah, it's a high-trust society. In some farms you'll find a fridge where you can get local produce and leave your payment in the box. Especially so in the mountains where they make their own cheese. You'll find me lugging a nice cut of cheese back home from a Sunday hike. That box will be locked though, because there's more people passing than at a remote cabin :-)

On the country side you can buy fresh fruits from small unattended shops on the side of the roads: you take a fruit basket and leave the money in a jar. (I only saw this in the Swiss German part, though).

I'm familiar with the roadside produce and the honor box, but for some reason an actual dwelling being open to all, or to just be assumed that by default it is open to all, I guess caught me off guard. Assuming something like that would be open to all, here, would be a dangerous assumption on my part. I don't think I initially took into account the extreme weather conditions during that time, which in retrospect makes a lot more sense.

It's common in the Swiss French part too.

In wilderness parts of the US you are usually allowed, by law, to break into unoccupied cabins/homes in critical situations (eg blizzard, you're lost, etc). You're required to leave identification and contact info and pay for any damages and/or supplies used.

Often people just leave remote dwellings like that unlocked and stocked with supplies, sometimes with a signature book and/or donation box. For larger places some people even build a separate cabin next to the main house for travelers to use.

Oh yeah, 100%, just last week I went to an unmanned stall by the road and bought some beans, left the money in the jar.

Pretty common round here. (in NZ)

Spending a couple of hours hiking up a mountain? Sure. Short-changing or even robbing the warden? I hope not.

In reasonably prosperous societies that take care of all their members and lack the cult of individualism, this is quite normal. Visible inequality, corruption, systemic persecution, and dire poverty tend to erode trust.

Perhaps... But Switzerland is one of the most atomised, individualistic societies I've lived in. Swiss social trust mostly comes from an abundance of means, as far as I can tell. When you've got a full belly and a roof over your head, crime just isn't as attractive.

Its part of culture. The state is not centralized (canton over federal), which makes each state independent and highly individualistic.

This ethos percolates down, well beyond empowering the minority via direct democracy: its shameful on the individual to not carry one's weight. The smallest unit is the one to trust.

Contrast that to other collectivist societies, with top heavy bureaucracies, where the top literally cannot carry their weight (debt/deficits) and the populace is always looking for the biggest bureaucracy to rescue them.

There's no trust in people, because people are competing to weaponize the large state to screw... you.

impressive. Especially the morphene

When I was living there, I was told that you could go to a rug store, see a beautiful say, Persian Carpet worth thousands, and they would say, take it home and try it out. If you liked it, you came back to pay. They didn't take your information, just your name. I didn't try it but I believed it. Switzerland was very much that way.

The best part is that the penalty for not paying is just a bigger bill from the same garage.

How much has your bill increased by now?

They have a pretty efficient system to force payment if you don't after multiple reminders.

Love this and it is true that trust is higher here, also lots of (high value) things are sold on tutti (ebay / fb marketplace of Switzerland), yet the country becomes increasingly a "normal" European country and trust decreases, also regarding salaries, self promotional plug: https://twitter.com/iwangulenko/status/1618865433108688896

> absolutely that! Coming from a country with very low trust both ways I was surprised that the swiss car mechanic (big chain from vw) didn't allow me to pay at the shop and didn't even tell me how much it will be because he'll calculate it later.

Also the fact that most online businesses allow late payment via invoice shipped with the goods feels crazy.

I had the opposite experience. Bought a 75” tv there. It had an extremely uneven backlight (clouding). Support told me to send it in for inspection. Tv broke on the way there. They kept it for three weeks and sent it back without mentioning that the panel was broken on arrival. After that they refused to cover it because it was my fault for not packaging it correctly. We finally settled on 50:50, so I got half my money back

The having to ship it back is a problem with a lot of warranty these days. I have a BenQ monitor that started failing after less than a year, but since I don't have the original packaging I can't get warranty work. As TVs/monitors get larger, are we really expected to keep all of that packaging in case of warranty issues? I'm just eating the loss and will add BenQ to my list of no-gos but there needs to be a better system for this.

With BenQ you can ask for a swap, they will put a hold on your credit card, but will ship you a new display, you can send your old one back in the new packaging, pre-paid shipping label, and once they receive it, they release the hold. Costs nothing and you don't have to go without a display.

> I have a BenQ monitor that started failing after less than a year, but since I don't have the original packaging I can't get warranty work.

In the EU, to exercise your mandatory 2 year warranty, you are not required to use original packaging by law, but manufacturers may require original packaging to honor extended warranties.

> are we really expected to keep all of that packaging in case of warranty issues?

Depends on where you live and your consumer protection laws. In some places there are laws/rulings stating that no, you don't need to keep original packaging - especially for statutory minimum warranties.

If there are no laws it's up to the discretion of the seller.

>>all I had to do was find the item in my order history click a button, answer a few questions and in this case they just credited the amount to my account

Exactly the same as with Amazon here in the UK then. They have every retailer in this country absolutely beat on their approach to customer support - it's always no faff, easy, often instant refund, none of this waiting 60 minutes on the phone to speak with unhelpful CS for any of the major retailers. John Lewis were the only ones approaching Amazon in the quality of their customer service, but recently that has changed for much worse and they are as hostile as everyone else.

As long as it's within 30 days..

Consumer laws give a much longer window, and the retailer is responsible for resolving the issue [0], but any time I've had to try and get something replaced after the time limit it's involved going back to the original seller, hoping they still exist in the world of random TM company names. Never understood how Amazon gets away with this.

0: https://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/advice/what-do-i-do-...

"The retailer is responsible If what you’ve bought doesn’t satisfy any one of the three criteria outlined above, then the retailer that sold it to you is in breach of the Consumer Rights Act.

This means that your statutory consumer rights are against the retailer – the company that sold you the product – not the manufacturer."

I've had Amazon refund me even a full year after purchase, no problem. Basically you go on chat, say you have a problem with some item, they say "please contact manufacturer" to which you say "I'd like you to resolve this problem under the consumer rights act as you are the retailer who sold me this product" and 10/10 times they just go "ok, would you like a refund or a replacement". Then I have the refund 10 minutes later. I've had hundreds and hundreds of orders from Amazon in the last few years and this hasn't failed me once.

This is essentially the same as the EU laws. However, my experience in the UK (pre-Brexit) is that these kind of laws are commonly ignored, For example, the same (EU) laws require that the full price is always displayed up front and that you can't tack on costs later. But e.g. ebay.co.uk has it hiding behind some link with some misleading language that makes it appear as if selling stuff is free (it's not). None of the other EU ebay.tld sites had that when I checked at the time: they always displayed the price on front.

I also had some other service where they advertised a particular price, and after filling in my personal details to order the service there was suddenly an extra mandatory charge which doubled the total price. wtf?! This was 100% illegal. I stopped as that was too much for me and they even had the guys to call me out of bed in the weekend to try and sell me their stupid stuff. I gave an unfiltered version of my opinion on that.

Can confirm, I had that happen with a cable. I filed a warranty claim and the response was "you dispose it, we credit it". When a second cable broke (oh no) they wanted me to send it in though.

I had this experience with Logitech and Anker.

Logitech actually ended up sending me two keyboards. First they sent me the same model but with a different layout (but still usable) and when I complained about the layout they sent me a more expensive model with the expected layout. No returns, few questions asked. Excellent RMA experience but that being said their mechanical keyboards AFAIK all have some sort of chronic issue and just aren't worth the price.

Anker didn't ask me to return the earphones but refunded only 1/3 of what I paid (6m remaining in a 18m warranty). Mixed feelings about it though the experience was positive. On general I expect things to last a lot more than the warranted period. Anyway I still have the earphones and they still work (with reduced functionality) so let's say that I remained with a residual + the refunded amount.

My experience is 15 years out of date, but back in those days many "big brands" insisted we only use their repair centres, and all we could do was ship stuff to them and hope for the best. Some were a little more flexible in this than others, but the flexibility was always very limited.

Especially with components like mainboards or GPUs this could be awkward, because turn-around times were often weeks or even months. We usually just replaced them without too much fuss, and then a month later we were sent back a repaired spare part that could perhaps maybe be used for a repair later. We generally accepted this as a "cost of business", but never seemed quite right to me.

While turnarounds on laptops were usually fairly decent, they could also be weeks, and replacing a €800 laptop on which we made €50 profit was kind of a non-starter. This also included stupid stuff like broken memory modules, or a broken hinge cover. The only way we could get reimbursed at all was by sending the entire laptop to them and hope it didn't take them 2 weeks to spend 5 minutes replacing a broken RAM module or something silly like that.

My point in all of this being: it's not necessarily the store's fault.

This sounds like pretty much how we use our credit card's extended warranty on purchases, except we do it via the bank's website (Chase or Amex, our credit card issuer), instead of the retailer. A couple clicks, and done.

(In the US) I deal with the manufacturer for warranty claims. How does the retailer know?

Is the system different in Switzerland? Or has this one retailer decided to take on being a arbitrator of warranty claims?

In Europe, by law it is the retailer responsible for warranty claims.

Many manufacturers will also offer warranty service, and it is up to you the customer which you want to use. Often manufacturers try to persuade you to contact them first because it costs them less than a refund would (typically retailers just refund rather than attempt a repair or replacement)

The law requires the retailer to deal with warranty claims. The law also requires a 2 year warranty minimum. Additionally a retailer must take back old electronics and recycle them at no cost to the customer.

The idea is that as a consumer, I made a contract of sale with the retailer, not the manufacturer or anyone else. So, if there's a problem I go to the entity I have the contract with, i.e. the retailer.

You can often claim warranty with the manufacturer if you want; depending on the item. It can be faster to do so, but you're not required.

You can also re-sell a product you've bought there with a click and answering a couple questions, right from your order history. It's a pretty nice experience, just recently did so with a Dell screen I no longer needed.

If you’re not home and the package doesn’t fit your mailbox, they will just leave it in front of the door of the apartment complex. Lived there for two and a half years and nothing was ever stolen.

> they or their repair center marked it as a no fix, recycled the card and I was credited the amount I paid, sadly that was during the GPU crunch

I bet somebody kept that GPU, fixed it, and flipped it.

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