I've been wanting to write this rant for a while. I hate extended service warrenties. They are pure profit for the companies offering them (hence the high pressure to sell them to customers) and fundamentally communicate to customers that products are low quality.

A couple years ago a friend (Erick) and I went to our local large electronics retailer (I'll call them "Better Buyer" to protect their identity) to pickup a XBox for a friend. At the time, I would imagine that amoung my close group of friends we owned probably 10 or more XBoxes - several had more than 1. Better Buyer was actually a close partner to Microsoft, so I was shocked when the clerk at the end of the line said "Yeah, these XBox units have a hard drive, which makes them fail a lot. I've seen a bunch getting returned all the time. For an additional $50 I can sell you an extended service warrenty which will cover it."

Wait. I've never heard of any of our hard drives failing. Not once. I lugged my XBox in a back pack once or twice a week, I've taken it on a boat, hosted XBox parties, etc. To have this jerk implying that a great product (I love my XBox) is crap just to make a lousy sale really pissed me off.

Then there is the car purchase process. You buy a car and the sales dude (or dudette) tells you how great the car is, and reliable, and safe, and quite, etc. So you decide to get the car - at which point you go into the "back room" to talk with the finance dudette (or dude). They then proceed to tell you that the car needs undercoating, fabric protection, and an extended warrenty. My favorite move at this point is to throw out comments like "My salesperson told me this was a reliable car and would last for a long time, did he lie to me?"... or ask to bring your salesperson into the finance office and get the salesperson and finance person to agree - is the car quite or not? will it last or not?

I hate this game. It's business trying to rip off customers that don't know any better. When I worked retail software we were encouraged to sell "extended service programs" after being purchased by a conglomerate. I never did well on my ESP numbers because I wouldn't tell people that the products we sold were crap.