Originally posted by carlb It's a similar situation here and they always try and sell you an extended warranty, even though under the Australian consumer law a warranty extends to "the reasonable expected life of an item" (the ACCC have guidelines on what these are). Most retailers either don't know, or will deny, that and try to tell you that the warranty is x months/years. And it's up to the consumer what the remedy will be, not the retailer (although it has to be reasonable). Consumers need to stand their ground or threaten to contact Consumer Affairs and that often gets a change of tune. And as for some retailers who say that you "have to contact the manufacturer" for warranty claims - it's complete BS. It's up to the retailer to sort it out with the manufacturer, not the consumer.
So yes.......extended warranties are mostly a complete waste of a consumers money and their only purpose is to extract a few more dollars for the retailer.
I agree except when you have an atypically cheap warranty, like the $20 Pentax 3-year warranties, especially combined with a product with some known issues. You got 1 or 2 (depending on your faith in your credit card) more years of having your lens release button reattached to a roughly $1000-at-the-time camera for $20. In theory you also got a free CLA with your $20, but I think nobody took advantage of that, except maybe somebody who lived next to the service facility.
---------- Post added 12-31-2020 at 08:46 AM ----------
Originally posted by UncleVanya I guess I can post over in the other forum for them. Indeed Ricoh told me this was a recent change to their policy - basically an across-the-board tightening of warranty policies. However this requirement makes no sense to me. My understanding is that before they were being more lenient, for example where sometimes all the required paperwork wasn't quite there, etc. but now they're cracking down.