"Priority," as in, to those that manufacturers claimed how great their product is and how great the warranties are in the first place, in spite of all the fine print and lawyer speak. Where the actual warranty process is made so inconvenient and loopholed, that they actually bet on a great percentage of customers not following thru with claims.
At some point, a service economy that creates less value than it consumes, is bound to eat itself out of house and home. It astonishes me just how handsomely someone feels their service is worth, compared to what value they actually create. It's all just turned into one huge sucking sound from every direction. I still work in manufacturing. I simply cannot and will not afford what amounts to a glut of parasitic middle people that offer nothing in return beyond a perceived sense of convenience, or paying for someone's allergies to actual hands-on work.
I went to buy a new Toyota once. They sent out some chesty 30-something bitch in a midriff shirt with tattoos, figuring I fit the profile of some mid-life crisis dude that would have been swayed by that. She tried my patience from the first minute figuring from my welding garb (I went by appointment on lunch break) that I was some uneducated, blue collar grunt. When I asked her to turn off her own, not-so-clever scripted spiel, she rolled her eyes and said and looking at my truck: "I bet you keep all of your cars forever." I replied that I keep them as long as I was promised they would last. At the time I had an '87 Toyota SR5 4x4 pickup, that I still really loved and had no intention of trading in. It's just that it had 300k miles on it and I didn't want to beat it to death for work anymore but just use it for off-road use and towing my boat. After getting the run around for an hr, that they could not find the actual truck they had advertised to me, but instead tried to push off some base model BS on me that they had obviously ordered too many of, I walked off and vowed to never step foot in another auto dealership again.
From a legal standpoint, warranties can be enforced, even if a manufacturer doesn't want to. This has been tried in court for a long time and it's a matter of finding a lawyer who's familiar with getting results. In MKE, an attorney made a name for himself as 'The Lemon Law Lawyer", partly for winning $880K for a client against Mercedes. Obviously, suing an electronics manufacturer won't yield the same results, but even going to the state's Consumer Protection agency can get results. Part of how someone can get a repair covered has to do with how they talk to the people who can get it done, or deny it. If more of them were like the woman at Sony in the mid-'80s, it would be easy but from knowing how others at the place where I worked treated her, if she didn't like the way they tried to push her, she would deny coverage. I, OTOH, got along with her just fine and she would even cover products that were out of warranty, but she had previously denied because the other guys treated her like crap.
It's very easy for a manufacturer to control middle people, especially middle management, because they need their jobs and the middle managers are very expendable. They might do things for a customer if the right names are dropped, though. I used this when Spectrum was screwing the pooch, kicking it afterward and leaving it in the country. After dropping the CEO's name, I think heard a puckering sound from the other end of the line. He immediately reacted, got someone on the line who could explain the problem and how to resolve it, complete with what sounded like a desperate apology. It got the results I needed but unfortunately, the subsequent BS didn't end and I had to drop the name again. It worked every time but when I did this a few weeks ago with someone from ATT, she didn't care.
While I'm no fan of car dealers, I don't know that ALL dealers need to be lumped into the same category as that Toyota place. She sounds like a real piece of work but they play games all the time- if you know anyone who's a sales manager at a car dealership, get them to tell you how to combat this crap. I think I posted about a customer from the first boat dealership I worked for- he stopped by to check in on his boat, wearing ink-stained coveralls after doing some maintenance at his print shop. He had gone to a BMW dealer on the way to our store and told us about how they wouldn't talk to him, had someone shadow every movement and didn't even bother to find out if he was serious. He was- he went to another BMW dealership closer to his house and bought one for himself & one for his wife while wearing the same clothes, because they didn't care how he was dressed.
