Complaint: Radio Warranty - Infant Mortality

Not Yet a delighted ICOM Customer (unidentified) writes



"I recently bought a new ICOM IC-2100H radio that died quietly in it's
sleep (on a shelf in my kitchen). It was only a week old. In
my heartbroken condition, I thought that I should exchange my
deceased infant for a new, working one. Because I purchased it
from a reputable dealer in Texas, with whom I have dealt before"...
" I figured it would be easy... but...


Now, many phone calls and voice mails from
Texas and from ICOM, I am told that this will be handled just as
if it were near the end of warrantee, not in the first week.
"Send it in, we'll get around to it some day soon, and send it
back whenever we get it working again".




I thought that when a BRAND-NEW radio fails catastrophically like this, it would be the "right thing to do" to send the customer a new one and then he can send in the dead one. This way I don't have to come up with shipping materials, visit the shipping store and pay for having the broken thing shipped off for several weeks when I haven't even received the Visa bill for it yet!




Don't Dealers and Vendors have a 30 day "swap" period at the
beginning of the warranty to cover Infant Mortality? As it is,
I probably have only 10 minutes use of this radio and now I am
having to pay shipping and live without it for several weeks
while ICOM Techs perform transplant surgery. (By the way, it seems
that the whole RF section is dead: lights are on, CPU front panel
works fine, but zero transmit, zero receive action.)




I believe that reputable companies should do more to back up their
products than this. As it is, over 2 days, I was "phone tagged"
to Mary, Sara, Sharon, Will, Will again, a service tech, Sara again, and Ray at ICOM, and somebody in Texas.




Do other companies (Kenwood, Yaesu, Alinco) have the same runaround,
or do they concentrate on delighting their customers?




Signed,

Not Yet Delighted
<hr>
QRZ Editor AA7BQ writes:




Wal-Mart has an unconditional return policy. I knew of a guy
who would go down and buy a new video camera each December so that
he could make his holiday films, only to return it on the
first of January - no questions asked. Down in South Florida,
hurricane warnings went up recently and people flocked into the
stores to stock up on emergency supplies. After the storm
was a no-show, back to Wal-Mart they went, goods in hand. People were
actually asking for and getting refunds on 79-cent gallon
jugs of drinking water.




So you think it's easy being a retail dealer... hmmm.




Ham radios are consumer commodity items, just like toasters
and microwave ovens. The margins (i.e. profit) on these items
is miniscule. A well known ham equipment dealer once told me
that his company made more money selling one of the QRZ CDROMS
than they did selling a Yaesu FT-1000. I didn't argue because
it's probably true. The big profit items are cables, connectors,
microphones, books, etc. The big radios are only to draw the
traffic into the store and the profit on them is near break-even.




The market has been so bastardized by
cut-rate discount sellers that brick-and-mortar dealers have
to compete with mail-order deals at near wholesale prices.
Some folks even visit the store, try out the radio, and then
place their order online to the cut-rate, no-store,
no-sales-tax dealer.




So, you bought and it died after a week. Would you be surprised
to hear the story of the guy who plugged his brand new
mobile (12v) rig into 110 Volts AC in his travel trailer and
fried it instantly to a crisp, only to demand an immediate
warranty replacement. I'm not kidding - it happens every day.




Let's say that you were a dealer and some bozo just pulled this
on you. You gave him a new radio and Icom said, "Nope, we don't
want it, it was misused.". You're stuck with a several-hundred-dollar
doorstop, and a happy customer from whom you were making less
than $20 in profit in the first place. You do the math: how
many radios do you now have to sell to make up for that one
bozo?




I don't know anything about your radio and so let's just stipulate
that it was a factory defect and let it go at that. What is the
dealer's responsibility under the law? In most states none
because the product was covered under a manufacturers warranty.
In most states, a dealer will give you a new radio, but only
if they feel they should, or, if they want to earn more of
your future business. If they don't care about either then
they've still held up their end of the bargain and have fulfilled
their responsibility. The radio was warranteed by Icom when
you bought it and you knew that, otherwise you probably wouldn't
have bought it.




I will be the first to agree that dealing with Icom, Kenwood,
Yaesu, or any of the other smaller manufacturers can be a pain.
Kenwood, for example, earns billions of dollars a year in
consumer electronics. If you added up all the ham radios in that
mix, it would probably be $10 million or less, or in other
words, less than 1 percent of their business. How excited
will they be about single unhappy ham? I'm not saying that this
behavior is right, only that it's a reality. Sadly, there's
nothing unusual about getting poor factory repair service on
a mass produced consumer good these days.




So, the 30-day Dealer Warranty? Sorry Dorothy, but we're
not in Kansas anymore. If you want a 30-day warranty then
it's a MUST that you ask about it BEFORE the purchase.
Get it in WRITING and buy with confidence. Implied warranties
usually don't hold up very well and spoken ones aren't
worth the paper they're printed on.




Sorry about your experience,




-fred