Shoveling It
We had a snowstorm in New England yesterday, which wasn’t a big deal unless you were driving in the same direction as everyone else. Before the storm, I checked to make sure I had all the essentials, and realized that my snow shovel was broken. So I went to the store and bought a new one, which led me to ponder the value of a manufacturer’s warranty. Bear with me.
When I buy a shovel, there are two things I look at: I want the blade to be rigid enough that it won’t break if I use it to bust up a big chunk of snow that turns out to be the curb (this was the fate of my last shovel), and I need the points where the handle and blade connect to the shaft to be robust. I’m also interested in what the shaft is made of, though I’m not sure I know if plastic or wood or metal is necessarily better. If these two (and a half) things are OK, the shovel is OK. As it turns out, the store had one that looked good in all of the respects I care about.
This shovel has a five year warranty. I don’t think I’ve ever owned a shovel for that long – I expect them to break or get lost after a while. If I have the same shovel at the end of a snowy winter that I had at the beginning, it’s noteworthy. Maybe I’m particularly careless, but it’s not like this is a $250 item – the new one cost about $10, which is about what I expected. And though I don’t mistreat a shovel (I don’t garden with a snow shovel; I won’t use it to break the giant icicle that sometimes forms between the raingutter and the ground), it has a difficult, physical job. When a shovel breaks, I assume it’s because I shouldn’t have shoved it under my wheels to get some traction while freeing my car from a plow-induced snowbank.
Shovels like mine are “Star” products, definitely – there’s nothing new in its approach like a Genius (though some shovels do have specific purposes – I have one with a kinked handle that’s easier for some tasks than the straight shovel), and it doesn’t stand for anything like a Hero product. So how should a manufacturer advertise that a shovel is “better” than the one next to it?
One way is to tell me that it will last a long time. Putting a five-year warranty on a shovel is appealing to someone who ends up shoveling often – obviously, no manufacturer would warranty a product for five years unless they thought the product could last that long. The interesting part is that I know this shovel won’t last that long – I will break it through abuse or lose it this year or next. The manufacturer could put a lifetime guarantee on the thing and I’d never take them up on it.
I once ran into the opposite case with a client that makes kitchen appliances. The particular appliance had a 5 year warranty, but consumers I spoke to all assumed it would last at least double that, so the warranty didn’t mean anything to them. Electronics manufacturers put warranties on things that should never wear out – if a clock-radio works when I take it out of the box, it probably always will.
So, in this age of products that are either emotionally disposable (like my shovel) or will never fail because of a manufacturing problem (like a radio), what does a manufacturer’s warranty mean to a consumer? If you go out of your way to tell me your product will never fail, should I trust you less?
Follow Me
That’s exactly how I feel when I buy electronics and they ask if I want to buy an extended warranty, for an extra year or two. I start wondering about the longevity of the product I am buying.
Years ago, while attending college in London, my pocketwatch broke. Off I went looking for a new one. The ones in the stores had two-year guarantees, which made me think that that was all they would be good for. Had they offered no guarantee, I would have assumed they would last for a decade or two. As it was, I went to the antique market and bought a gold pocketwatch from 1880 that still worked great. I figured if it lasted this long, it would probably last another hundred years.