Last weekend we purchased a new refrigerator. Our old one still works but it freezes refrigerated food and I've never liked the side by side arrangement. So after searching the web for good prices and going to several appliance stores, we ended up at Sears. They had just what I wanted and they had it in white, an increasingly rare color. Now I watch HGTV and know that stainless steel is the latest and greatest but all my other appliances are white and frankly the steel fridges looked too industrial for my taste. If I wanted to live in a sheet metal plant I could. But the real issue here is the warranty.
Why is it that every time you want to buy a major appliance the salespeople go overboard trying to sell you on the extended warranty? They give you this long spiel about how the electronics are expensive to replace and a service call is $100 and on and on. So on Saturday I looked at the salesman and thought, what, is there something wrong with the fridge that you're not telling me? Are your products defective from the get go? Even the department manager got in the action, strongly advising us to buy the extended warranty. I almost told them to void the sale if the machine is so unreliable that it will break down after one year.
However, my experience has been that even if you do buy the extended warranty, things always break down a week or two after it has expired, so it doesn't do you any good anyway. We only get an extended warranty when I purchase appliances on my own and am sucked into the sales pitch. I admit it I'm a sucker. My husband who can actually fix or at least diagnose appliance problems never buys the extended warranty.
Now when I really think about it, extended warranties are like little short-term insurance policies. I don't know about you but the whole insurance industry makes me see red. You'll notice they're not going under. I've got insurance for two houses, two cars, medical insurance, flood insurance, and life insurance. Of course all these companies will continue to insure me as long as I don't file a claim. And the flood insurance will simply never pay off because I don't really live in a flood zone. If it ever does flood here we'll file a claim with FEMA because the deductible on the insurance would bankrupt us. How's that for ridiculous?
But back to the subject at hand. If I bought extended warranties for all my "stuff" I'd have to include my washer and dryer, my dishwasher and oven, my laptop and desktop computers, and my television. Imagine how much that comes to! Enriching insurance companies doesn't warm my heart. Wouldn't it be great if appliances and the like just worked?
One of my recent joys was being able to use an extended warranty for my broken washer. Imagine my delight when not only did I locate the paperwork, but it had not yet expired! The only reason I bought it was because it was really cheap and I had experienced my dryer breaking down years before. The warranty people tried to sell me a new extension so expensive I could almost have bought a new washer after 3 years. I passed. Score 1 point to me in the warranty wars.
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