[saghm]

Yeah, back when I first started playing bass (which would have been around 2008, interestingly enough) I used their cables for a bit because of the unlimited replacements. As a young teen without any income, it honestly was a pretty decent deal; in retrospect, the cables certainly weren't high quality and probably developed issues far more easily than a higher quality cable, but I could also go into any guitar store that sold those cables and then trade them in for fresh ones, no questions asked. It wasn't like I really had that many gigs, so being guaranteed not to ever have to buy new cables was easily worth it even if it meant that I would have to go back to the store any time they failed. Eventually I got old enough that I had more disposable income and would play a bit more often to the point where it would be more inconvenient to have to get a replacement on short notice, so I moved on to buying higher quality ones, but I don't really see the experience I got as a scam. Maybe the were marketed to the point where people who really weren't getting the benefits from their model were still buying them when they would be better served by a different company's cables, but I feel like the model they were trying to do did at least make sense for me at the time, and I think that it's worth making a distinction between "trying to exploit naive customers by selling something no one needs" and "trying to market beyond the actual customer base that is served well by the business model", mostly because I feel like the latter is a spectrum that quite a lot of companies fall on to some degree, and it's not as clear to me where exactly the line should be drawn for how "acceptable" this is. (I'd be fine with literally any instance of this being called out and shamed, but realistically I think this is looked past by most people so much of the time that it's not accurate to claim anyone is actually doing it)