Back in college, I remember interviewing at Best Buy for a sales associate position and being asked to demonstrate how I would sell a customer one of their extended warranties. At stores like Best Buy, those extended warranties bring in big bucks and so they rely on their sales associates to persuade customers that they are a great deal.
Recently we saw an article over at Webware mentioning a new extended warranty program called GreenUmbrella. It works differently than an extended warranty that you’d buy at a store like Best Buy or Circuit City in that you purchase one plan which then covers multiple products for three years (TVs, computers, DVD players, cameras, etc.). It’s an interesting concept worth checking out.
This leads us to our next poll:
Do You Purchase Extended Warranties?
Whether it be something like Green Umbrella or the extended warranties offered by retailers like Best Buy or Circuit City, do you find value in them?
This is a simple yes, no, or sometimes poll. Either vote below if you have Flash enabled, or vote in the sidebar to the right.
Previous Poll Wrap-up:
In our last poll, we asked you which office suite you used if any. As it turns out, Microsoft Office is the choice of 59% of voters followed by OppenOffice.org with 28% of the votes and Google Docs with 5%. Microsoft must be doing something right!
Voted. (voted No, obviously).
Somebody tell me how to make those charts?
That particular chart is provided by Poll Daddy, who are the ones that manage our polls. We just take a screenshot of it.
Sometimes… depends on the product, reliability of that kind of product over time, and how likely it is that I would be able to purchase a replacement if it broke. On something like a laptop, I buy it if it also includes accidental damage and because I probably wouldn’t be able to afford a replacement in a short amount of time if it broke. Sometimes places like BB and Circuit City try to sell extended warranties on things like computer mice, and that’s just silly. Pay $14 for an extended warranty on a device that costs $35.
I have had a few instances where an extended warranty saved me when a device died. In one case, with a Nintendo Gamecube, Best Buy gave me a voucher for the full price I paid when I bought the console. Since it was a year and a half later when it broke, I took that voucher to the store, picked up a new Gamecube that came with a top tier game packed in, and still had almost $100 left over to spend on whatever I wanted in the store.
No way, if I had money I wanted to get rid of I’d get a higher end model!
Maybe you should have made two options: MS Office Legit and MS Office Pirated. That would have been more interesting. I run OO.
I don’t generally buy extended warranties. But I do pay more attemption to products which have an extended warranty included in the price. I’m happy to pay a little extra for 24 months warranty on expensive things like laptops or fragile and easily mislaid items like phones, PDAs, etc.
A little extra means £10-20. No more.
Google provides an easy API for making pie charts:
[veign.com]
I always get a laugh too when they try to sell the warranties for the smaller items- and they are always sure to point out how affordable it is!
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One of my friends buys the extended warranty for all of the electronics items that she buys. In one week alone last month, she dropped her cell-phone in water and her iPod quit working, and she got the replacements without hassle thanks to the extended warranty (both were through Circuit City) – but the interesting thing is that her replacements were refurbs.
I guess I should have mentioned in the article that the first extended warranties we ever bought were through Apple when we bought our MacBook Pro’s – because of the money invested, we thought AppleCare would be worth it.
That might be a good idea for a future poll.