John H wrote:
On Mon, 2 Aug 2010 09:32:49 -0700 (PDT),
wrote:


On Aug 2, 11:32 am, John wrote:

On Sun, 01 Aug 2010 10:52:50 -0600, wrote:

On 01/08/2010 6:20 AM, Harry ? wrote:


We know U.S. corporations have no compunction about firing workers in
order to further enrich their execs, and apparently they are the same
way about their products, too.


One of my computer printers is dying. A competent repair shop diagnosed
it and informed me a certain part needed replacing. The printer is a
couple of years old and parts are available, but the manufacturer will
not sell the part in question, even to its authorized service depots.


So I called the printer company Friday, and, after brushing off its
first line of defense, a barely English-speaking clown in India (I
asked, he told me where he was*), I got connected to a series of
U.S.-based service/technical folks.


At the end, the best deal I was offered was to buy a new printer from
the company at a "special price," which was *only* $50 more than anyone
could buy it for from any of at least 100 retailers.


The company I was dealing with used to have a stellar reputation. No more.


Anyway, this leads me to wonder if anyone is maintaining a list of those
U.S. companies that still provide good products and good service.


There is none that I know of except Costco. Buy most of my stuff there
too. One of the few retail chains I will deal with. Used to deal with
Sams Club but they don't have an aoutlet around here.

Besides, Costco has the best hot dogs going. Pizza's not bad either.
--

John H

All of my office computers were locally "built" with oversized power
supplies in oversized cases. This way we can simply replace the
mother boards and easily put various cards into them. All of them are
about 10 yrs old but all have very new guts.
My "Firestorm" rechargeable drill charger just failed. I cannot
complain too much because I did use it to build my Tolman Skiff,
still, maybe it is a simple fix. Took apart charger, ehhh, burnt out
resistors and diodes, not worth my time. If Lowes sells a new
charger, I'll buy one, if not, Maybe I will buy another rechargeable
drill.
At work, a $6000 HV power supply failed (OK, I shorted it at 50 KV).
We spent about two weeks trying to fix it because Spellman would not
do so. Finally gave up and found Spellman now sells a replacement for
$1750, SOLD.
At work, I have 3 1981 era JEOL 35C electron microscopes. I bought
the first on E-bay for $2500, had it shipped here for $2000, plugged
in, pumped down and it works, amazing. Original paperwork from
Chevron says they paid $250,000 for it in 1981 and added another
$250,000 of bells and whistles (which we got with it). I got the next
one from JEOL for free as a favor if I paid shipping of $1500 and the
third was also from E-bay. So, we keep the two for spares for the
first. Service engineers no longer know how to work on these old
machines, everything is computerized these days.

FWIW, I've had the DeWalt rechargeable stuff for several years now. Never had a
charger go bad, but have had batteries go bad. A local place, Batteries Plus,
will rebuild the DeWalt battery for less than half the cost of a new one. Don't
know if they have them where you are, but they do good work.

They can often repack them with larger batteries as a bonus.