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by smoldesu
1690 days ago
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I'm fairly sure most of their "like new" products are just returned purchases that couldn't be repackaged for whatever reason. I bought a Samsung Galaxy phone off the site a few years back, and it came with 90% of the original packaging, and the handset itself had no visible blemishes. Pretty good for a 40% discount. |
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Raw parts in, good parts out is easier and safer than usually putting in raw parts, but sometimes putting in refurbished parts. Imagine you need something as insignificant as a replacement SIM tray, a replacement for the bent SIM tray ejector pin, and the scratch protectors, stickers, and box labels that need replacement to get that in and out. The scratch protector plastic film might be automatically applied from a massive roll as the case is conveyed out of the coating machine; it's not made to be hand applied. How would a technician guarantee that it's just the SIM tray that broke due to contamination in the injection molding machine and not a problem with the spring contacts inside the phone? The SIM ejector pin probably costs less than a penny and is automatically inserted in every hardware pack that are stuffed and weighed automatically to a fraction of a gram; do you have a technician inspect each one or just throw the old parts away and replace the whole bag?
As a controls engineer, I work hard to make sure that a knowledgeable operator can run my robotic manufacturing cells with minimal waste. The first 80% of a cell, the no-faults "happy path" takes not too much time, but I have spent hundreds - probably thousands - of hours of my life ensuring that my cells are as flexible and fault tolerant as practical. But it's really hard. Customers are always on-board when it makes financial sense, and often when it makes environmental or ethical sense, but sometimes the laws of physics and the Pandora's box of automation just require some waste and leave a particular process untenable.