Hoover 5 years parts guarantee scam!!!!

Tucker

I thought there was something wrong with my hoover the other day.

I've recently taken on a new eastern european cleaner and she said it took her 5 hours to hoover the living room.



Turns out there's nothing wrong with the appliance, it's because she a Slovak!

Inactive

Tucker wrote: »

I thought there was something wrong with my hoover the other day.

I've recently taken on a new eastern european cleaner and she said it took her 5 hours to hoover the living room.



Turns out there's nothing wrong with the appliance, it's because she a Slovak!

:rotfl::rotfl::D

Inactive

Actually this is not a " scam " it is clever ( if somewhat devious ) marketing.

harperj_2

4 years on and Hoover are still being allowed to run their 5 year parts warranty scam why havent they been stopped this illegal and misleading activity.

8KG tuble dryer bought from Comet in November 2011. The drum bearings went 4 weeks ago and also the drum is scored through and needs replacing.As the sticker for the 5 year parts warranty is still on the front we rang them.
We were told the cost of sending an engineer out to identify the fault (which is obvious) is £100(plus labour which they could not tell us how much). We told them we knew what was wrong so he needed to bring the parts. That was not possible.

I was advised not to use the warranty and take out,immediately a parts & labour insurance with Domestic & General. We were also told that this insurance was new for old and if beyond repair would be replaced. The engineer would file a "write-off" report and we would be given a voucher to go to Comet and pick a new one.LIES!!!

We subsequently found out the parts were not in stock and had to come from Italy.To be honest Hoover cant agree if they are in stock or not.
The engineer came and agreed with us the faults.He knew nothing about the write-off and said "we repair these all the time"

We have now spoken to Hoover and D&G MANY times and daily receive a flood of lies designed to put us off.Several calls each day have solved nothing.

The staff are useless and when it gets too hot they decide they cannot be reached direct on the phone.

On Monday we received a call informing us that they had found an engineer in thesouth of England with the parts and booked a call for today 08.30 to 10.00am
This was changed this morning to 10.00 to 12 noon.
At the last minute we had a call saying the parts had not arrived.

Hoover and D&G absolutely refuse to write it off and give us a new machine despite what their sales blurb says. They have offered a solution by selling us a new machine at 60% of their RRP which is more than High St shops are selling at.

We advise anyone considering buying a HOOVER product to think again as you will not get what you think is being offered.

No one tells the truth.
No one is interested.
On one will get it sorted they just give you another phone number.
There appears to be no senior person to talk to.Alledgidly anyone with a brain is in Italy.
If you get them into a corner they put you on hold(15 mins) till you get cut off.
Hoover and Domestic & General hopefully will soon be the next companies to go under and the useless customer service staff join the dole queues where they so deservedly belong.

This is a summary of our problem as the detail is unbelievable.

grizzly1911

harperj wrote: »

8KG tuble dryer bought from Comet in November 2011. T

If you only brought it in November it should be under the 12 month (2 years now for EU?)all inclusive guarantee.

Your escalation route should have been directly back to Comet to resolve.

Would expect any white good to last 5 years even if I only got a proportional contribution towards another product. I have tested this on one or more occasions.

The 5 year guarantee ploy also extends to Hotpoint, if you try to register you then get bombarded by L &G marketing for ever more. I have even had two letters arrive each anniversary of purchase inviting me to take a up a "special deal", the only trouble is the monthly payments are different on each of the invites:mad:

kwatt

This may offend some people but, before you chirp back please make sure you use facts, not hearsay and poor press stuff. And, all of it you will actually find in Martin's advice on this site as well.

I'm no lawyer but, as a retailer of many years and involved in this stuff with the OFT and various trade bodies I will try to summarise it a best I can for you as there is a lot of confusion on this stuff.

Okay, first off, a parts warranty is jus that, a parts warranty. It does not cover the cost of labour at all and, to be blunt, if you didn't check what that was going to be before you bought whatever it was (Hoover or anything else) then really, you only have yourself to blame for not researching what you were buying.

Ormus is 100% correct, a normal consumer warranty does not apply to business sales. But the goods still have to be fit for purpose, i.e., they work when sold for the intended purpose. Beyond that, you're on your own.

Same applies for COSTCO, Makro and all these sorts of places.

Next up, the Sale of Goods Act (SoGA) is not a magic weapon that is there to allow consumers to extort retailers. It is there to ensure fairness on all sides and, any respectable retailer will act well within the legislation easily.

It does not allow you to claim a replacement by magic.

You have to be "reasonable".

To claim that something is "not fit for purpose" you have to do so in a "reasonable" time.

With a washing machine, has it been doing the job intended for a number of weeks? If the answer is yes, it has, then it would generally be assumed to be fit for purpose.

The actual change to it that got blown out of all proportion by the media was that the onus in the first six months to prove fault changed from being the responsibility of the consumer to being the retailer. In short, if the defect appears in the first six months the retailer has to prove that it wasn't there when the sale was made, previously that was the other way around.

Again, being blunt, it's pretty easy when you're a few months in, to prove that the fault wasn't there when new in most cases.

There is no test of durability in the SoGA. There is no way in the SoGA to prove how long a product should last other than it has to be "reasonable" under the conditions such as use, initial cost in relation to other products that are better or worse and so on.

I've had to study the legislation and worked with a barrister on this so, if you can prove this information wrong please feel free to do so. And yes, I have read the SoGA and other legislation from cover to cover.

There is no European all encompassing warranty. Complete urban myth.

What there is now is EU harmony (ha) on what we already have in the UK which actually extends to six years in England and Wales, five years in Scotland which is that, if you can PROVE that the defect was there from new then the retailer has to make remedy.

You do not have, as is often misunderstood to be the case, some mystical right to claim for a fault in this period through wear and tear or a random breakdown.

Inactive is completely correct although I would say it's a bit much to say it's a scam. You are not speaking to Hoover, you're speaking to the D&G call centre who will try to sell you an extended warranty and, so far as I am aware, JL do similar now.

You can find more on that here in an article I wrote for people about it.

But the bottom line and, I have to ask, what do you seriously expect for £159?

It cracks me up that people wash a greeter value of clothes in their washing machine (which they expect to last longer then the clothes) then bemoan the poor performance or longevity of a cheap machine.

If you work it back and, I know how to do that for most, the build price of that machine was probably about £90 at most and, that's being optimistic about it.

So it's cost the OP just over £10 a month to do laundry. To me, that is actually pretty cheap in some ways, expensive in others. But in reality and the actual cost of the hardware, about half that.

As part of a exercise for DEFRA (IIRC) I charted out what the cost of a washing machine should be now based on the retail price of a basic 1000 spin washer in 1983 through to 2009 only adding the ONS inflation figures (optimistically low) and published it later here.

You can't beat 20 years inflation, reduce the retail price in real terms and retain the quality on a mechanical device, it simply is not possible.

So you end up with cheap machines that have expensive warranties on them because they break. They break because the quality is scythed to save on production costs.

So you often end up paying more for low quality machines are you burn through them, especially if you are a heavy user. Bearing in mind that these are built around averages and the average UK household does 250-280 washes per year. Do more than that, you're classed as a heavy user.

Which leads me to why there is no durability in the SoGA.

The SoGA applies to all goods sold in the UK pretty much.

If you buy a car and do 200,000 miles in two years and burn out the engine you don't stomp into the garage and demand a new one. Everyone knows that is completely unreasonable and you will be on a hiding to nothing.

But it's okay when it's a washing machine?

K.

Jaynne

The entire prices only ever fluctuate with inflation is an incredibly poor one and in your article you highlight that with your examples of a couple of things such as housing and petrol which have not kept in line with inflation (they are much higher). By that same measure there must be items which decrease in cost over time.

Just look at what proportion of income used to be spent on food 80+ years ago - clearly prices depend on a wide range of things including technological advancements, manufacturing improvements, labour costs and the tax landscape.

Even if you didn't lay your cards out as a retailer its pretty damned obvious where your sympathies lie - a few weeks as a reasonable time to evaluate a product? Furthermore despite your FUD the SoGA is pretty clear that there is a test of reasonable durability and thankfully that is not a test set by the retailer. If you took a survey on the street what do you think the majority would say a reasonable durability for a washing machine is - certainly over a year, almost certainly over two. After all if you did three washes a week taking two hours each two years is 624 hours of washing and I don't see many washing machine companies sticking a MTBF of 600 hours on their machines to warn customers of that.

These warranties are quite frankly a scam in that a "parts" warranty is tied to an over the odds callout and labour charge. These sort of tie ins have been dealt with in other industries such as car warranties, house insurance with mortgages etc. Its about time the retail industry cleaned up its act too. Its no wonder that so many of them are going to the wall.

kwatt

Hi Jayne,

Please demonstrate where in the SoGA there is mention of a reasonable durability test that is not subject to a judge's review.

Part of this is me and a bunch of others pushing to have durability added as a part of the energy labelling standard with government. I want it to be published personally, it'd be great.

The reason is that it helps people make an informed purchasing choice instead of just guessing then clutching at straws when it all goes sideways.

So, you're inference that my sympathy's lie with manufacturers or retailers in largely a false premise.

A survey on the street of what people think is great but, it doesn't reflect the reality that the price of the raw materials has not dropped.

Meanwhile, the cost of production on non-mechanical goods that you offer a comparison too, has benefited from better production techniques, intensive farming and so on. But, at the same time as has been often highlighted, has suffered a downturn in quality as a result.

Many retail stores are going to the wall as people move to internet or large discount operations operating with reduced margins and without the same infrastructure for support which, amazingly, costs money to provide.

Believe it or not I am actually on the side of the consumer in much of this but, they have to help themselves and also be able to be reasonable in it all as much as retailers do. And, that starts IMO, with actually doing some good old fashioned research instead about what they buy instead of persecuting retailers for their failure to do that.

Fault on both sides basically.

K.

Candy53

Yep, all the companies must be doing it then. I bought a new cooker back in April and mine came with the 5 year free parts.
Then I read the small print and it said I would be charged for fitting them! You can't get anything for nothing.

Candy

rustyboy21

I have been through similar issues, with different products, ie gas fires.

!2 months guarantees are ok, if things go wrong after that, the manufacurer declines to get involved, and I, as the retailer, am not covered by the SOGA from them. The onus then comes on me.

I have had all this out with trading standards, and had it confirmed by them a number of times over the years, with the consumer in my shop, and have been told by them that my only obligation is to ' effect a repair' This means that I have to supply parts free of charge, but am able to charge for labour of fitting those parts. I am under no obligation to make a free repair including labour, or give a replacement , unless the consumer can catagorically prove that there is an inherent fault with the appliance from new.

This is exactly what Hoover are offering, as well as a lot of other manufacturers. It isn't a scam, it is more than they are required to do under law, unless proven unfit for purpose from new.

By the time you have paid for 2 independant reports from specialised investigators, you may as well as have paid the labour charge.

As other people have said, Makro, Costco and all other wholesalers are not covered under SOGA regs, they are Business to business. Retailers have less rights than consumers, when they buy for themselves, as they normally buy wholesale for large items like washers.