Quoted from pinballaddicted:We go through all the same BS for a warranty claim. Our distro always helps out as much as they can, Stern is difficult. We love all the new Stern games, they are fantastic. It is such a shame they cannot get their QC right. If you bought a new car and there was dents and scratches in the paint and the lenses were foggy or crazed or cracked you would not accept it. We need to be the same with our pinball machines.
I agree totally, Stern need to lift their game and stand behind their product. We all need to push them into doing it.
Back in February, I purchased a new car. It had a door ding and acid damage from bird poop on the hood. When a car sits on the lot, these minor imperfections happen. The dealer did a great job fixing both of these...they didn't involve Volvo, who manufactured the car. That's the big difference between these industries...with auto manufacturers, the service offered by auto distributors is complete and advanced. With pinball distributors, they rarely do ANYTHING to help. In fact, I would imagine most pinball owners never even meet their distributor face-to-face.
I believe Stern's quality issues are directly related to their success over the past 5-6 years. More titles, more employees, new manufacturing facility, etc. When car manufacturers "scale up", they lean on process/machines/robots to accomplish this. Unfortunately, Stern apparently does everything the old fashioned way. Low wage assembly line workers make mistakes and I bet aren't empowered to "stop the line" if they notice a quality issue.
At a high level, Stern can either slow down (i.e. produce less machines) and stick with old school OR innovate and figure out how to modernize their process (and produce more machines).
The notion of pushing Stern into building a higher quality product is right-minded, but naive. They are a pretty closed company when it comes to discussing their process and challenges. Until they open up, it's highly unlikely we have any leverage.