Maintenance Makes Up for Low Price

From a past Dollar Stretcher Outrage: “My almost new Timex Indiglo digital watch's battery failed, so off I went to get a replacement. I figured on a $3-8 battery replacement. But Timex has made it impossible for the consumer or the salespeople at the jewelry counter to replace the battery, so the store told me I'd have to do it myself. Timex wants you to send it to them, for $20 plus S&H they will replace the battery and send the watch back. It is not possible to do a battery change; the watch breaks ($50-70 watch). I threw away the broken into pieces watch and bought a replacement for $19 - And it is not a Timex. Their poor design has cost them a customer of 40 years.”

Welcome to the world of Maintenance Makes Up the Difference: car manufacturers do this as a matter of course, and so do retailers of any stripe. Ever wonder why imported cars cost more than local ones? They have a longer lifespan between maintenance periods, that’s why. This means you pay more upfront for the car and less in maintenance over the life of ownership—God help you if crash somewhere and need replacement body parts, because the cash register starts ringing up quickly in lofty amounts.

In the case of the angered watch owner, there is one more piece of the puzzle: battery life. Anything that comes with a battery, and batteries themselves, may have been sitting in warehouses and on store shelves for God knows how long—that battery may already be dead when the item is bought. Worse—in emergency season (hurricanes, tornados, etc.), when consumers are most likely to load up on batteries and battery-requiring items, they are potentially in for the biggest rip-off of their lives: dead batteries fresh out of the pack. There’s really nothing anyone can do about this besides storm back to the store and demand a refund or replacement (of more dead batteries).

In the case of the Timex watch, it’s apparent that Timex needed a new revenue stream. Since just about anyone with jeweler’s screwdriver can open the back of a watch, and department stores sell these services, Timex figured it could shroud their product in mysterious new “specialized” maintenance by asking the consumer to return the watch—at his expense—to them for a simple battery change. What better way to accomplish this than a newfangled way of extracting the old battery, which only Timex can do? Just when you think you’ve already paid for that watch once, Timex makes you take a licking and keep on paying.

First you buy the watch. Then you buy the watch again every time you need to change batteries, either by sending it back to them at over $20 a pop, or just buying a whole new watch as the customer above did. Either way, you’re out a whole lot more than the cost of a DIY replacement battery. Nice little racket Timex has going!

Now transfer this line of thinking to cars, appliances big and small, houses…just about anything you own or are thinking about owning. Carpeting comes immediately to mind—a living room can be carpeted fairly cheaply these days, due to all the “free padding and installation” offers out there, combined with the fact that all carpets come from recycled plastics. You pay one price to have it done, and think that’s it—then come the kids, the dog, the shoes, and the requisite grape Kool-Aid spill right in front of the fireplace. Since the carpet has a 10-year warranty (meaning “lifespan”), you’d probably end up spending more in carpet cleaning supplies and labor over the life of the carpet than you did installing it in the first place! If you sell before your carpet has “expired”, then you have made more money on the deal than you can imagine: you saved maintenance costs AND replacement costs that the new homeowners will inevitably incur because the carpet isn’t “their” style. The whole process repeats itself with every house bought and sold, and the carpet makers are the ones cashing in.

Perhaps now would be a good time for someone to examine (or re-examine) leases vs. owning when it comes to cars. But I digress…

This is why thinking long-term is so important. The initial flash-and-cash from the showcase to the register fades quickly when maintenance costs are added to the sales price. Impulse buying will always get you in the end, and leave you with nothing but buyer’s remorse. This is what keeps places like Jiffy Lube in business, despite having been publicly outed for ripping people off—everyone wants a car, but no one wants to pay for decent maintenance. People diligently shop for the best loan rates, pay showroom prices, then complain about the cost of dealer-performed oil changes and tune-ups. There never will be any such thing as a “forever” car—one that can go forever without a tune-up or oil change.

Maintenance costs should be diligently looked up just as much as financing or availability. This will be your hidden cost.