Why You Should Really Buy the Extended Warranty
Times are shitty. There’s no two ways about that. The purse strings are tight, the wallets thin, the pickings slim. Chrysler’s among the walking dead, jobs are dropping like flies. Frivolous spending is looked upon with scorn nowadays. Yet televisions still break, computers crash, hell, you might even want to pick up the guitar again now that you’ve got 40 more hours a week of free time. However, when you walk into Best Buy, the Apple Store, or Guitar Center and find that gee-whiz new toy you’re going to finance the shit out of/put on layaway, you’re faced with man’s oldest and most dreaded adversary: The Extended Warranty.
The Extended Warranty is the biggest god damn rip-off since Charles Ponzi took Boston by storm. I won’t go into every minute detail, but basically, most items that can be had with The Extended Warranty experience warranty-covered failures either within most manufacturers’ warranties, or well after any Extended Warranty would expire. Some plans cover shipping costs to/from the manufacturer or repair center; a savings offset by the cost of the plan, unless of course it happens multiple times, but then it’s clear you’ve wasted your money on something bigger: a shitty product to begin with. A lot of people are smart enough to realize the above. However, they don’t know that now more than ever, you need to buy the warranty.
Because the livelihoods of so many minimum-wage, commission-earning salespeople depend on you doing so. I see it every day. It’s horrifying. Retailers force their sales staff to pitch the warranty as if the customers were their drunk aunt and the warranty were detox, because oh how sweet that 100% gross profit margin is. However, people don’t buy it, because it’s straight snake oil and people don’t like being bullshitted. It goes right up the chain and back down again; the salespeople get in deep bukkake from their managers for not selling enough plans, and the managers get it from the corporate office for not training their staff on how to bludgeon customers over the head with sell the warranty. So the managers crack down even more on their staff, who then bludgeon sell it even more aggressively, which turns the customers off even more, and the vicious cycle feeds itself on and on until someone gets fired for “unsatisfactory performance.”
The buck stops with you, O Consumer! Buy the warranty, and inject some sorely-needed money into the working class. Be their bailout. Make that mopey sales oaf’s paycheck a little fatter that week so he can buy chicken wings/pay last month’s utilities/keep his Big Black Butts subscription current. By doing your part, you can pull us out of these economic irons. Then you can feel better about yourself as you watch Kim Kardashian on your 90-inch Indonesian-made plasma screen for thirty-nine straight hours wallowing in a pit of self-doubt and Cheeto dust.
