Someone I know has a Hope Vision 2 light, after about three years it started playing up so since he lives near Barnoldswick he popped round one Saturday morning. The guy he saw said that he couldn’t fix it straight away but leave name and contact details and they’d sort it out. It arrived in the post at his home address on Monday morning.
Ultimately we pay for this, Hope will have worked out a rate of return and factored it in to the price. When it comes to cutting costs, customer service is the first thing that the bean counters try to cut: customers don’t see it as something that they should pay for up front so the “higher price” supposedly affects sales. Is their kit the absolute best? Probably not but it’s of significantly better quality than OEM stuff and you know that if things do go south then they’ll look after you. That’s worth a lot.
It used to be that Dell’s customer service was really good, which was partly why they were more expensive than the box-shifters, but if you needed to ring them up you got a solution. Once they tried to compete on level terms regarding initial purchase cost then customer service got cut and things went downhill.