Daily Movement

In a previous post, wrote about a common camera repair horror story.

I just received the Sony DSC-T9 back from repair. It is still broken in exact same way as when I sent it in. Power off, power on, and it asks to set date and time again. Since it’s the fourth time in 90 days the unit has been in repair w/o success, the customer service rep. suggested that they request their Sony liason to get a replacement from Sony. No guarantee that that it would be approved by Sony, but I guess a case could be made. There are no other authorized (i.e. where Sony pays) service centers for Sony cameras. The Laredo, TX center is for the higher end cameras. So really, the only option is to continue riding this roller coaster until the ride stops.

The only positive is that I might get a “new” camera out of it. The only consolation is that each time I send camera in for repair, Sony is being charged for the shipping and service. Kind of like death by a thousand pin pricks.

In a way, the economics of out-sourced repair under warranty looks funny to me — perhaps the economists in the audience have a term for it?

The repair cost is paid by the manufacturer, but actual work and quality is under the control of the out-sourced center. The manufacturer cannot verify whether work is completed correctly (or at all), but they still pay for the work to be done. The out-source (if it’s a sole out-source) gets the business regardless of whether the customer is happy or not — it’s “free” to the customer other than their time to package and return the product. An unscrupulous out-source might even do low quality work to cause multiple repairs to happen. The perverse incentive (is that the appropriate term?) is that the lower quality of work, the more revenue from repeat repairs, so low quality is rewarded.

Similar reasoning can be applied to extended warranties using third party repair people.

The Economics of repair centers by Daily Movement, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 9th, 2006 at 11:03 am and is filed under Bay Area Bitching, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.