Lifetime Guarantee on tools

[surreypete]

Hi

I got some Halfords vouchers for christmas and went out and got myself some ratchet spanners, very happy with them but the 17mm spanner had a slipping ratchet, the rest of the set are good, very well made and almost Snap On quality.

Dug the receipt out yesterday and finally took them back for what I thought would be an easy refund, well it was an awful lot of hassle, the young girl on the till went off to get a replacement spanner and came back with a wobble head one, I said it's not from the same set and she said does it matter, well I told her I would have bought individual spanners had I wanted a mismatched set.

She got the manager out and he goes, we will have to order you a replacement 17mm spanner, by now I was dying to ask the obvious question and said why can't you take this faulty set back and give me a new set from the shelf, that's not company policy he goes, so I returned with is it company policy to sell something that isn't fit for purpose...... Got a new set on the spot.

The thing that worried me is that the Lifetime Guarantee is open to interpretation, is it my lifetime? the lifetime on the tool? also a lot of the time you need the original purchase receipt to show proof of purchase and how many of us can say we keep every single receipt for everything we buy just incase we need to take it back 5 years down the line.

Also in the current economic climate you may go to return a faulty product with a lifetime guarantee only to find that the company that originally sold it have gone bust.