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In a word, no, it isn't unethical.
Over on my weekly Frugal Hacks post, I wrote about how sometimes it pays to buy a product new, especially when buying from a business that backs up its products with a lifetime, unconditional guarantee. This is how we buy the HM's shoes, because he goes through them so quickly that otherwise he'd be forking out money for an expensive pair of shoes every six months or so. Most businesses offer conditional guarantees- 90 days, or only new in the box, or they specify returns only for a defect in workmanship.
But there are a handful of businesses that offer a far better guarantee. A lot of people, for reasons I have had a hard time understanding, think it's somehow unethical to take an business's word for it that they mean it when they offer an unconditional lifetime guarantee, and a couple of people have written to say so over at Frugal Hacks. I can live with people disagreeing with me (although I do not enjoy being called a liar or a thief), but I do like to understand where they are coming from, and I have a very hard time understanding what's so unethical or even complicated to understand about the fact that there is a difference between a limited guarantee and an unlimited guarantee.
You see, more than once I have seen somebody appear to aver that they understand the original intent of the guarantee better than the business itself- they will say that returning a product that you have worn out for replacement is somehow violating the 'original intent' of the business.
Let's take Land's End as an example. Lands' End has done everything they can to make it clear that their guarantee means what it says and has no hidden exceptions. In fact, these businesses use their unlimited guarantees as part of their marketing, because it works successfully for them. Consider this comment at Frugal Hacks, from Aubrey:
Years ago, when we moved from Chicago to San Antonio, we were terribly poor with no job yet. My husband had been a Bible school student and had a large supply of Lands End Wool “Year-Rounder” pants. “Year-Rounders” were not made to be worn in South Texas! My husband had few clothes and no money.
I called LE and spoke to a rep. I told her honestly that some of the pants were getting threadbare but all were unwearable here. She said “This is the exact reason we have this kind of guarantee. We know you will come back to us to buy more clothes.” She told me to box them ALL up and they would send him a check or gift card!
4 years after buying 8 pairs of pants, we had a check for all of them with which we bought him jeans and polos from their catalog. They won customers for life.
Indeed. It was because of their guarantees that we first bought shoes from LL Bean and stockings for little girls from Lands' End, and it is also because of they way they fulfill that guarantee that we bought the HG's college backpack and a couple of other items from Lands' End- purchases we never would have made without our other very positive experiences with them.
Consider this page from Lands End:
The Lands’ End guarantee has always been an unconditional one. It reads: “If you’re not satisfied with any item, simply return it to us at any time for an exchange or refund of its purchase price.” We mean every word of it. Whatever. Whenever. Always. But to make sure this is perfectly clear, we’ve decided to simplify it further. Guaranteed. Period.®
I'd like to return this taxi, please.
As you’d expect, over the years our guarantee has been put to the test. We’ve been given countless opportunities to demonstrate our commitment to customer satisfaction and our willingness to stand behind the products we sell – though none more demonstrative than the return and refund of an original London taxi.
Featured on the cover of our 1984 holiday catalog, the taxi was purchased for $19,000 by a Kansas native as a gift for her husband (an avid car collector). In 2005, her husband contacted Lands’ End and expressed interest in returning the car for a full refund. Of course, we obliged – because whether your purchase includes a tote or a taxi, your satisfaction is Guaranteed. Period.®
I do not think there is anything wrong with not having a lifetime, unconditional guarantee, either. That works better for other businesses. But it's just false to aver that when a business has a guarantee such as Lands' End does that it is somehow unethical to make use of the guarantee they plainly offer, and clearly use to successfully market their business. You do not know better than they do what they meant by their guarantee. Businesses do not stay in business for long if they cannot be clear about the terms of their relationship with their customers.
They have smart people working for them, and they have lawyers who check over the legal language. If they do not wish to cover their products with an unlimited, lifetime guarantee, than they do not use those terms. If you read other businesses' guarantees you can see the difference- a business might use the term 'expected lifetime of the product' or guaranteed against all defects in workmanship, or they will specify a time limit, or require a receipt, original packaging, and guarantee against failure under 'normal use.' There are all kinds of limited guarantees- and there is nothing wrong with them, either.
But certain businesses go further. Some businesses don't put limitations on their guarantees, and they do this deliberately. What would be unethical is a business using such a guarantee if they didn't mean it, but that seems to be what those who object to making use of such a guarantee think is happening, but oddly, they don't have a problem with that.
I suspect that part of the reason for these harsh judgments about the ethics of a family who takes a business guarantee at its word (but no such harshness directed toward the business that these people clearly take for granted is lying or at best being misleading about its guarantee) is the lack of clarity in language these days. People do not understand that a company does not have to use the words 'lifetime' and 'unconditional' if they don't mean it. But there's more to it than that.
It also occurs to me that these objections to recognizing a lifetime guarantee means exactly what it says and not less are actually a reflection of just how conditioned we have been by our disposable, consumerist and materialistic culture that has trained us to accept the concept of planned failure as a reasonable business model.
Our grandparents and great-grandparents expected things to last- and they did. We expect things to be disposable, and they are, and we somehow have come to believe it is even unreasonable to expect products to last more than a few months. We have been successfully brainwashed by marketing campaigns and business models founded not on value and worth of the product itself, but on planned failure. Another word for that is Planned Obselescence:
Marketing practice whereby products are designed to become out of date long before they actually need replacement. Planned obsolescence capitalizes on such things as material wear-out, style changes, or functional changes and is said by its critics to increase waste, resource shortages, and environmental pollution. However, advocates of planned obsolescence consider it a means of satisfying changing consumer demands.
LL Bean, Lands End, and other such companies were founded in an older time and on a very different premise. Consider this policy from Lands End UK:
"We deplore the waste implicit in disposable fashion and our clothes come with a lifetime guarantee. So, if your favourite Lands' End piece should need mending, we are now offering to repair rather than just replace or refund it. We want to do our part to reduce the mountain of clothing sent to landfill each year. This is what we mean by sustainable fashion."
Back when people believed in integrity, both as a business model and a personal commitment, they also believed in the integrity of their products. That's why those older, established businesses made the guarantee they do (and it's no coincidence that most of these companies are New England companies, either, with their long history of thrift and Yankee parsimony), and it's why they still stand by their products. Forever, if that's what their guarantee says.
How bad is our disposable culture? I come from a family who never throws anything away. I own some dresses and hats that are 80 years old and they are still in good condition- the dresses were stored poorly, in an old abandoned farmhouse without climate control, so they have a few spots where a moth got to them, but the seams, the fabric, the integrity of the materials, otherwise have held up perfectly. My children use them for dress up clothes, and I actually wear the hats to church. They have no holes, no tears, no loose seams, no deteriorating edges. They are in astonishing condition and wear better than some other hats I purchased new just a few years ago.
I have some thumbtacks that are, seriously at least thirty years old and they are incredibly sturdy and dependable. They do not bend as easily as newer thumbtacks do, and recently when I was taking a poster down, the new thumbtacks bent, the colored tops popped off, and they lost their shape. That was the only thing they'd ever been used on. The older ones have been used many times and are still sharp, firm, and solid because they were solidly built with better workmanship and better materials to begin with.
Today's comparable junk is flimsy and clearly intended to be disposable. Worse, we take it for granted that this is reasonable and acceptable, so much so that we assume it's unreasonable to believe a lifetime guarantee means just that.
I have aprons that are well used even though they are over sixty years old and they still have no holes in them. People once could wear and rewear the coat that had taken Grandmother through finishing school or her first year of marriage, and the only evidence of that was the change in style, not the deterioration of the product. Products were once made to last a lifetime. The Sears blender in my kitchen, one that works better than most blenders today, is actually over thirty years old because things were once made to last.
The HG and Strider will be starting housekeeping using the same dining room chairs that my grandparents owned 70 years ago. These are the chairs my mother gave me when my husband and I set up housekeeping. We have used them in our dining room with our children and hundreds of houseguests over the 27 years of our marriage. They are still sturdy, intact, and solid (although they are knicked in a few places where children have been careless with their cutlery). Other chairs we purchased new have come and gone, their legs snapped or collapsed, their seats broken, or they simply became too rickety for anything but firewood.
The 'coffee table' in my living room is the trunk my grandmother used to go off to college with. I took it with me when I left for college some fifty years later. Now over three quarters of a century later than when my grandmama was in college, it has survived umpteen moves, salt water climates, storage in a shed with no climate control, bird droppings, mice, and more- the finish looks a little rougher than it once did, but the trunk itself is still sturdy, strong, and in sound condition- the lock is broken because we broke it deliberately when the key was lost- and breaking that lock was hard to do.
What ought to astonish us is not how well these plain wooden chairs or the old back trunk have lasted, but how short the lifespan is for a dining room chair or a piece of luggage today.
Once we as a culture expected things to last. A pair of shoes that lasted anybody only six months would have been a thing of shame to a business. We did not shrug our shoulders and accept it as the way things are when a chair broke before it was a couple of years old. Our great grandmothers stored their old clothes in trunks in the attic because they knew the fabric would last and could be remade into something else later- or the fashion would come back around.=)
There have always been businesses that knew they could make quicker money by making products that did not last, requiring people to replace them more often, but once upon a time customers knew the difference. Somehow, we have been trained to think that the reasonable lifetime of a product is shorter and shorter, and that it's really impossible to make an item that actually does last a lifetime.
