Hello Hamish!

Monday March 13 1995 13:01, Hamish Moffatt wrote to Mark Barnes:

 HM> All my components were new too. Since it was for my own use there was no
 HM> need for these warranties, but I would certainly not charge what you did
 HM> for the difference.

...and you would not stay in business too long. You forget it actually
costs a dealer money to service a warranty claim. There's freight to and
from the supplier, the phone call(s) to organise the supplier and the
customer and to a chase it up if it takes too long, and often the fax for
an RA# and then there is the time you spend doing all this stuffing about.
Often you have to also spend some time to actually diagnose the fault. You
don't pack up whatever
the thing is (eg a whole system) and send it back and say to your supplier
'its broken'.

Lets say you made say $30 on a hard disk. It dies. You spend time to be
sure its not their controller or something. You phone up your supplier (25c
local call, more if STD), organise an RA, send it back $10 for freight.
Your customer hounds you the next day so you ring your supplier to check
they got the drive ok and how its going (25c or more). Ok. You're lucky, it
comes back the day after (another $10). You ring your customer to come and
get it. Your customer is an idiot and cannot install it so you have to.
Takes time. So all up you've spent at least $21 in immediate costs, plus
your hour or so stuffing about with it. Oops, we're suddenly loosing money.
What if the drive dies a 2nd time in its 5 year warranty? You'd have been
better to have never sold it!

 HM> What's a labour warranty, if the parts warranty has already expired? You
 HM> guarantee you didn't put it together wrongly? I think in the third year
 HM> that any problems would already be obvious ...

User comes in with machine dead. You find that the power supply is at
fault. Machine is out of warranty (parts) so you charge for the part but
don't charge for your time to find the fault and correct it (even though it
does cost you money).

Regards,

    Matthew

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