I see I am in the minority here but "bad parts" are bad parts. I agree 3 years is a long time but on the other hand this stuff should not break that easy. I know I would be pissed also but I doubt I would trash talk against one supplier. Sadly 95% of the stuff we are all buying today is made in China and it is a bunch of shit. Chris (HEP) put a post up about that a few weeks ago.

If I was the supplier I don't know what I would have done 3 years later. But I see the OP point also.

The sad thing is accepting junk as being OK is just part of the world we live in. I just bought a new recliner about 3 weeks ago from a major company and that recliner broke in 11 days. They exchanged it with zero issues but I still was kind of pissed because I wasted 1/2 a day dealing with it. Between dragging the broken one back to the store, getting the new one home, unboxed, and put together, etc the process ended up wasting 6 hours of my time just because someone used a bad piece of wood to save a company 25 cents? NO QUALITY CONTROL in CHINA - that is one thing for sure.

As far as "don't buy extra parts ahead" I do just the opposite when it comes to stocking up on "spare parts". Since I realize so much stuff being made today is total junk if I find something made well I typically buy a lifetime supply of that item. That way next time I need one I know I have something good already in stock instead of having to buy 3 or 4 of that item from different suppliers just to find a good one.

Getting good products these days is nearly impossible. Recent examples for me are not pinball parts but because I sell a good bit online I go through a ton of boxes & tape. I bought tape from 5 or 6 different sources that I hated. Then one day I bought a case of tape that worked great. The next day I ordered 3 more cases from the guy and started communicating with him about buying tape in quantity from him. About a month later I drove 9 hours to his business location and picked up a full skid of tape. That skid of tape will likely last the rest of my lifetime but I got so tired of dealing with shit tape I didn't want to ever deal with buying it again.

Then two weeks ago I needed some small boxes. I ordered 200 from one of my regular suppliers and this time around got boxes that are not wort a shit. So I ordered from another supplier I also use and got 200 "good" boxes. Today I am ordering another 1000 of those boxes just because I know they are good and I don't know when that supplier is going to change over to "for shit" boxes.

It is sad you can't count of getting good product these days but it is the way things have become. So you just need to find ways to "work around it".

The tape is packing tape I use to seal packages I ship and the boxes are one of the 20 or so different size boxes I use to ship pinball parts in. Unless you sell a volume of stuff and are shipping it you can imagine just how much packing tape, bubble wrap, packing peanuts, and other packing supplies someone can use in a year. My annual average cost for just packing supplies exceeds $5000 and I am one person doing it part time. Nothing is extremely expensive but over time it all adds up.

This weekend I am making a 1/2 day run just to pick up a few hundred bigger boxes I got a deal on from someone going out of business. Regardless how much packing stuff you buy it seems like you always need something you don't have in stock when you are shipping dozens of packages a week.