To counter the cynicism that creeps into us from time to time, allow me to relate the times that my warranties did work:

1) I purchased a Fisher Space Pen at an “antique” shop with an ink cartride over 20 years old. The chrome metal shell separated from the brass innards in use. I wrote Fischer that I was not the original owner and that I only paid a few dollars but asked if the lifetime warranty applied. Two weeks later, received a new ($35) pen with fresh ink and a second refill with a nice letter saying the old pen was not repairable.

2) Duracell batteries leaked in two diving flashlights. I wrote that I probably got the batteries from a dollar store, so I couldn’t be entirely sure they were genuine, but they looked legit. They sent me $75.

3) In the 2000s, a circa 1990 Brookstone mechanical dial tire pressure gauge became erratic. The Brookstone manager required a sales receipt for an exchange. Slightly irritated, I went home to my file of “lifetime warranty receipts” and found the faded slip. Got a new one.

4) Bought a $30 Rubbermaid trash can with a 10-year warranty. At eight years, the bottom corner cracked in the winter. I might have needed to send a photo with the receipt, but I got back a check for 90% of the retail price of a new can.

5) An evil spirit infects my iPhone 5s. (I’m a fanboy, and everybody knows Apple products don’t get viruses, right?) It’s really hot to the touch with no apps running, so I put it between two blocks of Blue-ice from the freezer to avoid thermal runaway and battery damage. I make an appointment and the Apple store rules out a short circuit and re-flashes the device and installs the latest OS version for free.

6) Chromebook dies after three years of hard use. I buy a new one, different brand. I click on a bad link–the URL includes tons of diamonds (unicode?) and the tab crashes. I use the hot key to report that I had this bug on my first Chromebook but it was fixed. I think I allowed my system to attach a crash dump to the error report so they’d have something to debug. The newer Chromebook is on a different code family that lacks the fix. Three days later, Google pushes down an update. Yes, I suppose it’s “just” a back port, but still.

7) My local optician cheerfully replaces nose pads whenever I break them–even for glasses he didn’t sell me.

8) My year-old Felt-brand commuting bicycle cranks deformed so the pedals were not at 180 degrees to each other. To scan traffic, I’d stand on the pedals like a meerkat and that stresses the crank. Also I’m big. Not “maybe I should skip desert” big, but rather, “holy crap, how did you split the split the seat on an office chair” big. Still, I’m within the bike’s weight limit. The crank carried Shimano’s long warranty and the bike shop installs it for free, even outside the bike warranty.

9) Costco deserves special mention. A laptop square-bracket keycap flies off during the no-questions-asked warranty period. (Programming–lots of arrays.) They looked at the keycap for all of two seconds, compared serial numbers and cut a check for the full purchase price.

Bought a wooden bunk bed (over 15 years ago.) Smelled like varnish a year after purchase. I suppose the finish just didn’t cook. Without the box, a receipt or any record of our purchase in the Costco computer, they refunded what we thought we paid for it–about $300.

10) Honda seat belt retention springy thing failed to retract the seatbelt. The car is below the 50,000 miles safety equipment warranty–so it’s fixed free. Same for the Takada airbags–fixed free in a 10-year old car.

11) Sony LCD TV–a $2,200 46″ TV–wowser! Ten (?) years in, the electronics started getting wonky. Sony came to my house and plopped a refurbished set on my stand for free under an almost secret warranty, found by Googling the symptom online. Still runs over 5 years later.

12) Showing my age here. Bought Yamaha headphones in the 1970s with $80 of hard-earned newspaper delivery money. To put that price in perspective–a loaf of bread in 1978 cost–oh, never mind. One audio channel goes, Yamaha fixes it for shipping and handling. I gave it away fifteen years later.

So warranties work if you favor companies that offer them and make things that can be repaired:

I once built a PC simply because every component–CPU to power supply came with a 3-year warranty rather than the 1 year that typical assembled PCs have.

For laptops, I favor companies that publish their “service manuals” with diagrams of all the internal parts with part numbers for ordering. (HP shines in this regard.)

This stuff is better built because they know they’ll eventually pay for defects.

Asking sales people which products “don’t come back a lot” and what domain professionals, rich, busy, time-more-valuable-than-money people buy is also a good way to supplement the data you get from Consumer Reports.