Quote:
Originally Posted by Solicitous
I wonder what they are going to do with the returned units with peeling paint? Will we see them offered at a discount price or shipped back to China for replacement? If they offered to sell one for 50% of the retail price I'd buy a second spare one without a thought of blemished paintwork.
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My guess is that won't happen.
(a) Assuming that it was actually a factory mistake, they may require the faulty units be returned to China in order to verify the number of affected units to determine how they compensate Astak.
(b) Given that image counts for quite a bit, Astak would be very ill-served by selling those flaking units at any price. Out in the wild, they will represent the line badly when showing them to others. Alternatively, the owners may be embarassed by how shoddy they look and be less likely to show them off or evangelize about them.
(c) Assuming that the fix is labor intensive but relatively straightforward (disassemble, strip the bad paint, repaint properly), it would still most likely be more profitable to do that and be able to sell them as "refurbished" at a 15% discount than just drop the price by 50% and sell as is. And that's assuming they chose to sell as refurb instead of simply saying they're new. (Especially any that legitimately never shipped to a customer but were caught at Astak after the story broke and they started inspecting their inventory.)