You probably have heard the roller-coaster that has been my experience and relationship with my Garmin watch recently. I was in love and out of love in a year's time as far as that thing is concerned and at the end of it all I am basically done with Garmin as a company from this point forward unless they do some sort of drastic overhaul as far as their customer service is concerned.
The watch was just a teensy bit over the warranty when the battery started going on the fritz and initially it was something that was just odd and a little inconvenient, but the occurrence of the watch simply switching off became more and more common to the point where I basically expected to look down at my arm and see a blank screen most of the time and couldn't even get it to turn back on. Then it started shocking me when I would touch it when it was plugged it. That was the final straw.
This is new territory for me because I have never owned a watch with a lithium battery in it before now. I completely understand that such a thing would be considerably more complicated than your run of the mill Timex. There are O-rings and seals that you can't just muck about with and expect it to be easy, but like anything, there is no chance it is impossible to have it done.
Garmin flat out refused to replace the battery at all when I contacted them, and the once super-helpful staff at the local store here in Chi-town all of a sudden became quite aloof, fake, distant, and kept passing the buck when I would attempt to explain my displeasure. They kept giving me corporate contact information and politely but also somewhat passive-aggressively explained to me that it is company policy that they do not do repairs on products with expired warranties. I understand if a company doesn't want to repair something FOR FREE after the warranty is expired, but they dont' want to do them at all? That's just sounds like cheating to me.
I don't have enough money in the bank that a $250 watch going tits up simply isn't going to affect me, so this has really turned me off to them as a company. To me, this is clearly a situation of them planning on their equipment to fail after a certain amount of time and they try to wow you into getting something new.
I'm not Karen, so I didn't lose my cool, but I think they have it built into their company policy to try to lure people into remaining customers with certain incentives that are designed to keep you around. Instead of addressing the clearly bad policy of refusing to repair products, they offered me a rather large discount on a new watch - and offer that as far as I can tell online, isn't offered to new customers anywhere. I wasn't going to allow this though because I was too angry about the whole process. I will not do business with a company that has kind of ruined the purchasing landscape with a policy that is designed to keep you purchasing new stuff until the end of time.
My solution is to never purchase anything made by Garmin ever again in my life and honestly, that is all I can really do.
one funny thing that happened was that when I explained to them that my watch was now physically shocking me when it is plugged in and wanted to demonstrate this to them in the store, I noticed that the place was surprisingly devoid of accessible power outlets and they wouldn't allow me access to one behind the counter in order to prove it to them. I suppose if I was a very vindictive person I could sue them for this defect, but I am not going to do that. Instead, I, without being a guy making a scene, informed the people in the store that they have lost me as a customer forever, and I will write an email to corporate informing them of the same.
I am certain they will have some sort of BS response, if it is even read by anyone, making excuses but to me it seems very clear as to what is going on here. These things are built to fail. If you look online there are people that have done comprehensive testing on Garmin batteries and have discovered that the batteries start to losing the charge at an accelerated rate after 500 charges. These same experiments have stated that the battery becomes unstable and unpredictable after 1500 charges. Now I know this is a long time if you are only charging once per day, but this could all be resolved if the swapping of batteries was allowed.
I realize there are people out there that will do this procedure for you from a 3rd party supplier, but I am not going to do that.
To me, this is clearly Garmin attempting to force their customers to constantly be consuming, and I do not want to live my life this way.
I am currently looking at several options as far as my next purchase is concerned and strangely, the companies that all seem to have wonderful repair and replacement policies regarding their products, all seem to be Chinese. I never saw that coming.