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Of all of the Kobo returns I've ever encountered (and working for Chapters/Indigo, I've seen a few), I can tell you this...
Most of them have physical damage to the screen. There's often a nice, obvious place where the point of impact happened, then a spiderweb of cracks radiating from there. Sometimes it's just a few cracks across the surface- the same way a mirror in a frame would look if it were dropped on the side.
Having worked with electronics before and seen a ton of damaged devices over the years, I can testify to how few people are willing to admit that damage to their devices is caused by negligence or carelessness, or even due to a simple accident. Everyone wants it replaced and doesn't want to pay for it, and are willing to scream and cause a scene in order to make it unpleasant to deny them. That's just how the electronics biz goes. Accidents aren't generally covered under warranty. People don't want to admit to accidents/errors, because repairs and replacements are expensive... but I have yet to see a single electronic device of any kind that mysteriously damaged itself. If something's got a great big crack down the middle, something happened for that to get there.
The glasses in your cupboard and the glass in your picture frames on the wall don't mysteriously crack on their own, why would a Kobo?
Of those remaining returned readers that were not obviously physically damaged, when those readers were set back to factory settings and put through their paces, they've generally been just fine and behaved 100% normally. We send them back to Kobo anyway- something might be wrong that we can't see with brief testing at the store level, but I think the likelihood is that most of those turn out to be just fine even under closer scrutiny. Someday, I'd like to know how many Kobo gets back that are actually just fine.
So far, I've seen all of TWO Kobo readers that genuinely did something abnormal. TWO! That's pretty low, precentage-wise. One had a WiFi connection issue, and another one had a battery charging issue... but that is still a very, very low number of problematic readers.
As a result, I have a great deal of confidence that if you treat a Kobo with the care that a device that has a big piece of glass in it deserves, it'll serve you well for a good long while.
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