Lifetime guarantees are pointless - but they sound good on marketing material

 Earlier this year, I wrote about the phenomenon of ‘Just Riding Along’ (JRA), sharing some of my own experiences with customers who simply could not admit how they’d managed to damage their bikes and associated equipment. There is, however, an obvious flipside - which is why, today, I’ll be exploring the often confusing world of guarantees, warranties, and replacement policies. 

Undercover Mechanic

Cycling Weekly's Undercover Mechanic will be publishing his opinions on the state of the industry once a month. He's been working with bikes for over two decades, offering servicing on models from some of cycling's best (and worst) marques. You'll find him at all major trade shows and events, just don't expect him to make himself known.

First things first: guarantees, warranties, and replacement policies are not all the same thing. But, the lines between the three can become blurred. 

A guarantee is simply the manufacturer or retailer setting out what they will do should you become displeased with the product that you’ve bought.

A manufacturer’s warranty is the manufacturer defining under what conditions they would consider a defect in something they have made.

An extended warranty is essentially an insurance product offering to extend the timescale within which the above can be applied.

Now, manufacturer’s warranties pretty much only ever cover manufacturing defects, not wear and tear. This is where crash replacement policies come in, as they often offer a full or discounted replacement should your product suffer a catastrophic event.

In the UK, the minimum warranty period is often between one and two years, likely because that is the statutory period in the EU. However, the 2015 Consumer Rights Act - which supersedes any warranty or guarantee - means customers actually have six years (five, for those in Scotland) to make a claim on a faulty product. 

The rub for local bike shops is that the manufacturer warranty is often around two years, leaving bike shops liable for the remaining four years - as business-to-business (B2B) sales are exempt from the statutory consumer rights and fall under whatever business sales contract they have signed with the distributor.

This whole issue is much more confusing in the US where US consumer protection is fragmented across federal and state levels, leading to lots of variability and overlapping agencies setting the rules. If in doubt, speak to either the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to find out what the statutory rights in your state are. 

The more positive reality is that most manufacturers will work with their dealers to resolve any issues that can be put down to manufacturing or material defects, even outside of their stated timescale. It’s also worth noting that a product that is genuinely faulty at point of purchase normally shows itself pretty quickly, in the first few uses. It’s always made me chuckle that some companies offer ‘lifetime guarantees’, knowing full well that anything covered under this guarantee would show itself very quickly within the usual statutory period anyway. But a lifetime guarantee sounds mighty impressive on the marketing material, doesn’t it? 

The fact that fundamental problems on a bike show up pretty quickly makes it very easy to spot bogus ‘JRA’ claims. We had a customer in the store a couple of years ago, claiming a crank wasn’t assembled properly, and that it was rubbing on the frame. On investigation it had clearly been removed and spacers swapped from one side to the other so that a cadence sensor could be fitted without rubbing, which resulted in the chainrings scuffing the other chain stay. The bike was unrideable in this state, but the customer was adamant that it had always been this way. He changed his tune when we showed him the email he had sent us a couple of months earlier, thanking us for how well the bike was riding.

Broadly speaking, consumer rights in the UK mean that you are eligible for a full refund if an item is faulty, not as it was described or does not do what it is supposed to. The item must also function for a reasonable amount of time. Don’t even get me started on fit for purpose. I think it could be argued several modern product designs do not fall into this category. 

Inevitably there is quite a lot of grey area here, which some customers do try to exploit. We had a client years ago who wanted to return his bike because he said the advertising made it sound like he would be able to ride like Lance Armstrong and he clearly couldn’t; let’s not dig too much into why he couldn’t, but needless to say we did not refund his money on that occasion.

I think as consumers, there are a few key areas it’s good to understand. A shop does not have to refund you if you knew an item was faulty when you bought it, if you - or someone else - damaged the item by trying to repair, or if you simply don’t want it anymore (unless you bought it online in which case you have 14 days in which to change your mind). 

It’s not unknown for bike shops to refuse to refund a broken bike they have sold if it has been taken to a different store to be serviced, as they have no record of how well the bike has been looked after. In the same way that cars require regular service intervals for warranties to apply, a bike isn’t designed to run without servicing for extended periods. If you can’t prove your servicing regime, then it’s pretty difficult for you to claim that the product wasn’t fit for purpose, so remember to file those servicing receipts.

And, all of these consumer rights, warranties and guarantees only ever apply to the original purchaser. We recently had someone come to see us asking for a refund on his new wheels which had broken. We hadn’t sold these wheels to him, but we did work with the brand, which was why he had brought them to us. It transpired that not only had he bought them from eBay but had been using these road wheels on his mountain bike. He had managed to invalidate any consumer rights he had on pretty much every count. We ended up selling him some new wheels with a big discount, as he had made us all laugh so much.