The HENRY Company

We had a customer that bought a vacuum at a warehouse-type mega-store, and they have (or had) a policy of lifetime replacement on anything you bought there when it broke, even if it was due to abuse, etc. After the 3rd "free" vacuum replacement, she dragged the broken thing in to us to look at under the manufacturer's warranty. Well, since most discount-store-grade vacuums have plastic brush rolls, they usually melt at the ends unless you are extra vigilant in your maintenance, and most manufacturers don't cover that, so I couldn't help her (not for "free", anyway). I suggested that she consider something more suited to her situation, i.e., something that couldn't be bought at the discount store. Her reply was : "But theirs are 'free' for life!" So I got philosophical, & said : " YES, BUT 'FREE' JUNK IS STILL JUNK." I asked her how much time has she spent running around getting the "free" replacement vacs (packing up a van-load of kids each time), how clean her many hundreds of dollars worth of carpet is staying with the half-functioning vacuums, how long said carpet will last, how clean her air is with the dirty carpet & a dirt-blowing vacuum, how clean she thought her kid's lungs were staying in said household... Maybe I'm crazy, but NOTHING is more valuable to me than my time! Just the time this woman wasted on her "free" vacuum replacement alone (so THAT's why he kept putting those quotation marks around the word "free!") is very sad to me. You only get so much time on this Earth, so how people value their time so little is beyond me. And in this case, the "free" vacuum actually costs more in time, gasoline, carpet, asthma meds, nerve-endings - hers AND ours as shoppers (I'm sure those kids are losing patience with their semi-annual trip to replace the vacuum, & whine accordingly) than if she bought a good vacuum in the first place! Spending money is cheaper than "free"? Just another of life's paradoxes.