I confess. I’m a little confused at the rationale of Apple right now. If you are going to go to the trouble of opening retail stores to better serve your customer and you are also offering a warranty on your products, why would you risk the negative customer response when you ask them to pay shipping for a device that is right in front of them?
I agree with the poster of this article. They know they have you over the barrel. Giving them $30 for refurb Ipod Nano is better than keeping your old broken one. Arrggghh. Those pesky Apple guys!!!
http://www.johnbatdorf.net/blog
I posted this comment on the original blog, but I think it’s worth posting here too.
I had a 4G IPOD die during warranty and was miffed at the $29.95 s/h fee when I was first told of it.
Apple impressed me with their execute though. They overnighted an empty cardboard shipping box to my door. I put the ipod in & dropped it off at a DHL location (CopyMax, I think) on my way to work. I could check its shipping progress online and in a day or two Apple had it back. Later that same day the website showed they diagnosed it as bad and a new one with the engraving on the back would ship out the following day.
All in all, I had a new ipod back in my hands in less than a week and it was very low hassle. I ended up being happy to pay for the service.
The alternative would have been for me to find a box, pack it as best I could, find some place to ship it, pay for shipping there, wait for the U.S. mail to get it back to me, (Without the fee they would be motivated to use the cheapest aka slowest shipping possible). etc.
I suppose to keep everyone happy they should offer a no-cost slow method whereby you pay to ship yours back to them and they ship it at their cost to you via the U.S. Mail.
I also suppose it’d be better if the Apple Store could just replace it for you at no charge, but the Apple Store is geared toward sales not warranty replacement work.
I think other companies could actually learn from this. Dell and Compaq are far worse at customer support in my experience.
I guess my reason for thinking it was a bit absurd was that if they are going to have a retail store, they should offer a no shipping option. It didn’t cost them $30 to ship that replacement Ipod to the store. (it probably came in a box of 50 that cost $10 to ship)