>> I'm just wondering whether they actually did anything different at all 
>> for the extra money, that's all.
> 
> Yeah, they guaranteed that it won't fail within certain tolerances. 
> Those tolerances are *much* stricter than for the cheap version.

Well, certainly for resistors, they have a machine that just churns out 
resistors. They vary all over the place. The ones that are more than 10% 
wrong get thrown away [or perhaps recycled, IDK]. The ones that are 
within 10% of the correct value get sold cheap. And the ones that are 
within 5% of the correct value get sold expensive. But it all comes out 
of the same machine, and costs the same to produce. [Although I guess 
the 5% ones are rarer, assuming a normal distribution...]


>> you it'll take up to 15 days to arrive. But actually it arrives within 

>> hours. And it still arrives within 12 hours. Do they actually do 
>> anything different? Or is it just a tax on stupidity?
> 
> It's a guarantee.  Sure, you order something online and you could get it 
> in 12 hours.  Or, you could get it in 2 weeks.  I've had both occur.

It's like when I paid extra to have my package from Zazzle arrive fast. 
The ones I didn't pay extra for arrived within 6 days. The ones I paid 
extra for never arrived at all. In the end, I had to drive to the depot 
and get them my ****ing self! >:-[ NOT AMUSED!

[And then they tried to invoice me for unpaid VAT. I never did pay them 
that back...]

> When you pay extra for shipping, you're paying for a guarantee that it 
> will arrive within a certain timeframe.  If you're ordering a gift for 
> someone's birthday, for instance, and their birthday is 3 days from now, 
> do you want to gamble that the gift won't arrive on time?  Or do you 
> want to know *for a fact* that it will arrive within 3 days?

If only it was a *fact*. It's not like you can demand your money back 
when the item still turns up 3 weeks late...

> As trite as the old saying is, "You get what you pay for".  A lot of the 
> time, people decide that the quality really is worth the extra money 
> (like your printer).  The trick is knowing when to pay for quality, and 
> when to go cheap.

For something like a printer, which actually wears out, it can be worth 
paying more. For something that passively measures a temparature and has 
almost no possible way of malfunctioning... well, I know what I'd do. ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message