markinaustin wrote:I think there's a couple of logic-gaps in this. Perhaps the reason there are so many Dyson refurbs is because they're WORTH refurbing. They throw the Shark's away. Dyson also offers a 5 year warranty, so that's a lot of years to replace or repair them. Most people don't repair out of warranty vacuum's so you could atribute the number of refurbs to a longer warranty.
When people are deciding whether to repair something they generally only care if it still has a warranty. Provided what they purchase isnt simply disposable for $30 or $40, if something has a warranty (and if they can find the receipt) they will send it in for repair.
The Shark has a five year warranty.
Meile has a seven year warranty.
Oreck vacuums can have a six or seven year warranty, and their "Forever" models have a lifetime warranty. Yes lifetime.
Even many Hoover vacs (including their newer Platinum series and "Air" vacs) have a five year warranty.
Thus nobody is going to throw these away if they break, because all of these vacuums can cost several hundred dollars. So why don't we see refurbed Orecks or Hoovers or Sharks on woot every other day?
Why don't we see refurb Hoovers for sale at Best Buy or refurb Orecks for sale on Amazon? It surely isn't because they have shorter warranties.
Plus - and this is an important point - the refurbed Dysons you so often see are current generation models. We aren't looking at six or seven year old DC01s here... we are looking at current gen models.
This tells us that these refurbs are fairly new. Thus either they break down fairly often, or people return them fairly often. Either way they are obviously returned at a higher rate than other brands otherwise we would expect to see other brands as available as Dyson, and we might actually see some other refurb brand available here on Woot.
I personally don't think Dyson's break down any more than other brands, but what I do think is that they are returned more often after people use them and realize they aren't any better than the $100 Hoovers, Bissels, or Eurekas they were used to.
Any new vacuum should perform better than a used model that hasn't been maintained, but if these new Dyson's are impressing people straight out of the box, I can see why they would be boxed up and returned to the store.