Improvement Insights Blog

Companies always nag you to buy the extended warranty for everything from teapots to computers. Is it worth it? Not if you know the Weibull (bathtub) curve.

Download my free ebook, Agile Process Innovation-Hacking Lean Six Sigma for Results.

“Well hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].

“I don’t know about you, but if you bought anything electronic, they always try and sell you a maintenance agreement on it, even if it’s a $27 electric teapot. Right? It’s like, WHAT?

“If you know anything about the Weibull curve, it’s called a bathtub curve. What you discover is things die early; it’s called infant mortality. You have very high mortality early on and then it flattens out for a very long time and then they die in old age. What they’re trying to do is get you to pay for the window here where something might die, but in general they make a lot of money off of that because most things don’t die anymore. They’re just made too well. Right?

“So infant mortality, and most of these things have a one-year warranty anyway. So buying an extended warranty doesn’t do you any good because it’s going to be after the infant mortality part. That’s the bathtub curve of the Weibull.

“So I want you to get this idea that maybe you should question these things. If there’s already a one-year warranty, that’s going to cover your infant mortality. You don’t need an extended warranty. When I buy computers, they always want to sell you a two, three-year warranty. Well, heck, in two or three years, the price performance of computers, the cost has gone down and the performance has gone up. I need a new computer anyway, right? Think about this as a way of understanding how things are being made and what you can do to save yourself a few dollars.

“Anyway, that’s my Improvement Insight for this week: Understand the bathtub curve, and avoid those high costs that have nothing to do with infant mortality. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”