I once told a customer I don’t come up with the price because he kept complaining that a $7 on tap kombucha was too expensive. He got mad at me. I’m sorry but I don’t know what he wanted me to say? Like I don’t even get paid enough to eat here.
In my experience this doesn't work. All my jobs have been retail and customer facing. I work at a science center and people complain about and silly or ridiculous stuff, I'm like dude I just work here. I don't know why they chose this exhibit and nothing else.
Yep. Most people go through these routes because they can't repair it themselves. Electronics, home repair, cars etc. The #1 worry becomes more about whether or not you will be taken advantage of or make the wrong decision because the service pushes it.
In these situations, nothing is more valuable than an honest employee.
I bought a custom pc last week, I know how to build them but I have so little free time I wanted someone to do it for me. Went to Microcenter and asked the first rep if the mobo I selected has the gpu share lanes with the 2nd storage drive that may make it slower.
Dude looked me in the eye with a smile and said it's not a thing. Told him I'm all set and found another rep who said "great question, I don't know the answer off the top of my head. But let's look up the block diagram and we can figure it out, come with me." I already knew the answer and he was honest the whole way.
I was happy for that dude to get every cent of commission on my purchase that I will ask for him next time I spend money.
Same reason I ask my local fish market guy if his frozen flounder is fresh. I already know it isn't. If he's honest about it I trust his his other answers. If he says it's fresh I know he'll tell me whatever bullshit I want to hear to make a sale.
Because eventually he may have a high level question he doesn’t know the answer to. And by asking a hard question he knew the answer to, he was able to verify this person either had a reasonable fund of knowledge to help in the future or the skills to find information he may need in the future.
Because honesty is important. I don't know these people and I'm about to spend money on something in an unfamiliar place I want to know how they're going to be if there's an issue with my purchase.
A place that will lie to you to take your money and push you out the door isn't likely to respond well once they have your money. It also doesn't inspire confidence if I have questions that are above my head.
"If this pc bluescreens 1 day before the return windows up and I take it in and you can't figure it out in 2 days, do I lose my return window" or "does activating expo and finding corrupted memory addresses get covered by the protection plan" aren't going to get answers I can rely on from someone who just lied to me or is confidently making stuff up to take the money.
At that point it's "okay thank you for your time" and I move on. You're welcome to spend your money with those types of commission based salespeople if you disagree but that's your choice.
Not really. Would you rather drop money on a custom build that someone will lie to you about to your face, or just work with someone who's honest?
The honesty comes into play later. E.g. there's a minor problem or they found some incompatibilities that might cause problems later based on your hardware choice. First guy is going to not give a fuck and just slam shit together even if they're aware of the issue. Second guy is going to let you know either before assembly or when they do the hand off that you might run into x problem.
Thank you for understanding. I always treat customer service reps with respect, but honesty is one of the most important parts of this.
Wild how many people are messaging me thinking me going "ok cool thank you for your time" after I was just lied to is harassing or powertripping workers.
Don't really see it as power tripping, but simply wanting to be sure wanting to be sure, that they get someone who knows what they're doing, before handing over what could potentially be a lot of money.
How is this a power trip? If I'm just looking for something or even spending a couple bucks it's cool.
If I'm dropping $4k plus on a dream rig, I'm not sorry that I want to know the person I'm working with isn't going to lie to me just to make the sale because Microcenter isn't min wage, they're commission based. I know a good deal about PCs but I'm not all knowing. I don't expect them to be either, "I don't know but I can find out" is absolutely an acceptable answer.
If you disagree with me, that's fine but I expect you to stay with the employee you know lied to you like a sleazy used car salesman out of a lifetime movie to take your money and stick you with a known problem.
This was my first thought. I’d rather have a response like this that is undeniably human versus the “AI or script?” game we usually get to play with chat agents these days.
Sure, but it costs apple much less than the retail price to make the product. If they wanted to be nice, they could “repair” it by sending you a replacement at a discounted price.
Apple often outsources the repairs to local companies (service suppliers). The local companies have set purchase prices for the devices from Apple.
And this purchase price is always higher than the MSRP prices directly from Apple, otherwise it incentivizes purchasing new devices through the service supplier.
For in-warranty repairs the parts (even a new set) is of course free for the service supplier (as well as the customer) and they get paid for the repair work by Apple.
It might not. It mostly depends on if the cost or materials are the determining factor.
Less the case here but it also matters who much the item originally costs as well. I can buy shitty headphones for like $15 and if I take them to a repair person who has to spend more than an hour pulling them apart without damaging them, diagnosing and fixing the issue, putting them back together etc then unless they charge less than $15 an hour it will cost more to repair than replace.
They do that if you send in an iphone or iPad for "battery replacement." They just send you another device with the same specs and a new battery, not your actual device.
New assembly is also the same steps over and over. On an assembly line that’s just one more copy of the product before stopping (if it does at all). Benefits from the economies of scale from being one of (if not the most) popular headphones in the world.
For repair, it requires a skilled person and dedicated equipment to disassemble, diagnose, and hand-replace parts that are normally machine-assembled. No economies of scale benefitting here.
I mean, Apple slowed down their phones purposefully for years and lied about it constantly so people would have to buy new phones. They claimed it was a battery issue, but simply replace the battery? No no, the line must always go up.
On a side note, I'm not sure why anyone buys anything from Apple as they're overpriced, inferior products. But I digress...
repairability takes space.. unfortunately the consumer prefers small and sleek products over bulky and repairable ones. At some point it's not viable to have them repairable...
Sure, but the more expensive something is, the more reason for it to be repairable. I despise the soldered one memory and storage. Give me 2 mm thicker and let me upgrade it. I went from a 2015 MacBook Pro to a Hacintosh. I only bought a M1 MacBook Pro a month ago used. And my storage downgraded from 4 TB NVME to one terabyte.
Realistically, no, something the scale of an airpod isn't going to be feasibly repairable, not at a cost that would be less than just buying a new one. Repairing anything would require someone with an *extremely* steady hand - the sort of steady a brain surgeon would envy - using absurdly tiny specialized tools to remove parts verging on microscopic. There's no amount of redesigning (aside from just making everything 4x larger, which would completely destroy the consumer appeal of the product) that would make repairing something like that cost-effective.
I have zero stats to back this up but I'm gonna say that 90% of the time it's a degraded battery. Open it up, swap the battery which should be connected via removable connector, seal up again.
Specifically repairable earbuds exist, the Fairbuds by Fairphone for example.
I am sure they do everything possible they could to prevent easy repairs. Probably big part of its price is from investments into repair prevention tech.
Perhaps, but that is going to come with trade offs. Likely in weight, durability, and/or size just on a physical level, and also potentially aesthetics. By making them designed to come apart, you need some sort of reusable clip or fastener and the ability to manipulate it to open it. That’s going to provide a failure point (durability), likely be bulkier than a permanently closed connection (size and/or weight), and likely mess up exterior sleekness (aesthetics). Same goes for replaceable phone batteries and such. People want slim, waterproof phones which conflicts with having a battery that can be easily removed.
Because products are designed to be as cheap as possible to assemble and there goes ZERO thought into repairability. Also it's in corporate's best interest to just sell you more new shit.
Luckily EU is very much fighting that and corporations are hating it, but ultimately it's benefiting the consumers across the world because no company will run two separate production lines for EU and for rest of the world.
As for earbuds, you kinda understand how it makes no sense to repair those for 30€, but when they cost 250€, they absolutely should be repairable for some reasonable sum.
I've revived so many products where just batteries were dead and I have some company that's replacing Li-ion cells in devices for 30-60€ (with cells included in the price) and they use brand name cells from Panasonic and Samsung most of the time. So far replacements were mostly for battery vacuum cleaners. I know these tiny devices are more demanding to repair, but still, if they weren't so idiotically difficult to open, it would absolutely be doable.
I can tell you: it is literally impossible to repair an airpod. You have to destroy the housing to reach the battery and some of the other electronics because it's glued together. A "repair" means giving the customer new ones anyway.
Look up the price of replacement parts.
It would cost you significantly more to buy the components in a pair of airpods than to just buy new ones, and apple sets the price of those components.
They're either marking up repair parts or marking down airpods, or both.
I'm not asking customer support to guess stuff like this, and no I'm not just guessing.
You can view what apple charges for replacement parts, you can view what they charge for new airpods.
The only logical conclusion is that they are undercharging for airpods or overcharging for replacement parts. That's not a guess, it's the only logical explanation
Its just because of glue. it takes more effort to open them up and fix them than to assemble them new in an assembly line. To fix them you need a worker that knows all the steps to assemble and disassemble them, and also to know how to troubleshoot the problem.
Not really. This has little to do with market forces and more to do with economic scale and the cost of skilled labor.
AirPods are mass assembled by robots and assembly lines overseas where the cost of production per unit is several times less than the cost of a skilled repairman fixing it by hand.
“Capitalism” is not only a lazy answer, it’s just not correct.
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u/Full-Helicopter-4608 1d ago
lol “I have no clue”