Do 95% Of Returned Gadgets Still Work?
Accenture, which used to be the consulting wing of good old Arthur Andersen went down in criminal flames, has come out with some surprising figures on returned tech ("Accent on the Future" is the origin of the firm's name, which is a nice way to distant oneself from scandal while sounding like your company manufactures gentle laxatives, but I digress).
The news? That while $13.8 billion in technology was returned in 2007, only 5% of that mountain of discarded tech was truly broken. Accenture stipulates that 68% of returned products did work but failed to meet customer expectations (this smells like returned gifts, bad-but-not-broken products, and other reasons people invent for returning gizmos they don't really want). The remaining 26% were returned because of honest buyer's remorse, but I can't imagine that there isn't a cloudy gray area between the two subsets.
Terry Steger of Accenture stressed the complexity of gadgets as the root cause, but I'm not convinced. Then again, I just returned two printers because they frustrated me, so maybe I'm just in denial?
95 percent of all returned gadgets still work, Americans don't read manuals [Engadget]
tiny dancer
Posted to Hot Stuff, In the News on 3 June 2008
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: returned gadgets, returns
I only get to deal with video game console gadgets in my line of work, but I can't count how many times a wireless controller or network adapter or other futuristic widget has left our store only to come back 30 minutes later with the assertion that it's broken. The problem isn't that people don't like their gadgets. It's my experience that they get returned because people can't figure out how to use them.