acountryfarm - Thanks for the response. Looking at the pics of your bath posted on the B & W Bath thread, I certainly don't think your tile falls into the "cheap stuff" catagory... I think your bath is beautiful. The subway seems to have a patina, which is what I am looking for and not the cheap high glossy look. Did you buy it from a local dealer or on the internet? I live in a very small town close to nowhere, so my choices are limited.......... I will check with the two local stores in the area and see if they can get me a sample. Does it come in any other colors????

Actually, the warranty doesn't carry over specifically to be a disincentive to have you country hopping for your purchases. Aliris's example is the unfortunate consequence of when people move across borders and lose their warranty coverage, but a warranty isn't a right, either. It's an incentive for the shopper to buy. The company says, look, you're not taking such a big risk with us. We'll warrant the product for a year (or however much) so that you'll be sure that we'll take care of any faults. A warranty is just a little piece of paper. Much easier than manufacturing and testing in a way that people have that much confidence to buy your product that they know there won't be a problem. Warranties are also used as pricing tools. When Gaggenau had the big sucky price increase they also increased their warranty to five years. Gaggenau products aren't without fault, but pert near. People have never had a lack of confidence in the brand. Still, when you raise the prices 38% (part for the rise in price of steel, part for the stress of the difference between the dollar and euro at the time, part to cement their position as a luxury brand), you have to do something to keep the people coming. Saying, "Remember us? The uberreliability people?" is pointless. Quintupling the warranty says, you're giving us more money, but we have your back. Similarly, on the low end, companies use warranties to salve their reputations. When new Korean makers of low price little cars entered the U.S. market, they slapped really long warranties on them as an incentive to buy. You don't know us and you think we're junk but we'll keep that junk going for a long time. When foreign cars were beating American cars for reliability, the American companies slapped bigger, better, longer warranties on them to say, the press may have you believe you'll be spending more on repairs, but we'll cover it, so really we have a better price. So. What's the deal with portability? Pricing is set by how many units they think they can sell to optimize their profits. If selling more units means that the cost per unit rises and eats into the total profits, they won't expand their production. If selling fewer units means they're under utilizing their resources and undercutting their profits, they'll make more. They use these optimal production ideas, and pricing information from the various places they sell their goods, to figure out how many to sell in each place at each price. Again, to optimize profits. Canada has about a tenth of the population as the U.S.A. Most of the population is fairly near the border, however, as opposed to up in the arctic region. We're not talking about the pricing in Yellowknife. It seems logical that Vancouver or Toronto should be the same as Seattle or Detroit. But much as it sometimes seems like there isn't a difference, Canada does have different laws and regulations, different distribution systems, tax structures, etc. The manufacturers set up their systems for each country. They might even have the same rep serving the entire NW, including both Seattle and Vancouver, but they have different structures and goals for each. Neither Canada nor the U.S.A. object to you taking appliances across the border, so the manufacturers have to do whatever they can to support their optimal pricing structure in the two different places. They do this to support the dealers, who don't want you flocking across the borders instead of buying from the local guys like them. One disincentive that costs the makers absolutely nothing, and, in fact, actually gains them a bit in missed warranty calls, is denying coverage if you go outside of your local market to buy their stuff. But really...how many of you have warranty work done? I did have a service call on my gas cooktop in the first few months, but it was an installation issue. Wolf wanted to have it checked out anyway, but they could have told me the likely culprit over the phone, and I would have had the electrician fix it without having the service call, if there was no warranty. I know we hear a lot about warranty work about this and that appliance here, but that's because of the nature of a forum. When things don't work, people talk about them. The very least regard I put into whether to import my induction cooktop from Europe was the lack of warranty. I talked to Gaggenau service, here, to make sure they could fix it, since I didn't want an orphan, like some of the folks who bought Fagor or DeDietrich from out of the country had before induction was plentiful here. As long as there was someone who could fix what might go wrong, I wasn't hung up on who would pay for it, figuring it would be out of the warranty period by then anyway.

Maybe, depending on price and you? Product failure is not likely, but not freakishly unlikely. Cost of repairs might be pretty significant for many middle-class folks, but hardly catastrophic. How do you feel about risk? There's an objective bit and a subjective bit. The objective bit has to do with the expected value of any given insurance policy. What's your expected harm on appliance A, B, or C? That's a function of the likelihood of damage times the cost of the damage (get a little fancier and we can talk about this over a period of time and discount the value of future harm). An insurer probably has pretty good information on the expected damages, or risk, involved. Not perfect. Evidence specific to the latest version of the RNB is limited, so they're going by information on proxies -- similar products -- but they've probably got a pretty good sense of this. The subjective bit has to do with the question whether, and to what extent, you are risk-averse, risk-neutral, or risk-preferred. The insurer should be pretty close to risk neutral. It's not one human individual but a large (we hope) corporate entity, that's well capitalized (we hope) and does not (housing issues or paper aside) have all their eggs in one basket. They cover many, many people and many, many possible events and being wrong about any particular event shouldn't matter (unless it's really huge), because over many, many events actual outcomes tend to get closer and closer to average ones (that's the law of large numbers -- the variance shrinks as the "n" goes up). That doesn't mean that they price the insurance policy right at the expected value -- they've got people to pay, investments to make, margins to protect, etc. A private individual might be more risk-averse for several reasons. One is one's own psychology. One has to do with the relationship between one's psychology and a given magnitude of potential loss (how awful would it be if you got the short end of the statistical stick). And one has to do with the fact that, if it's just you, the variance is way different than if it's an insurance company. Flip a fair coin 20,000 times and you'll come pretty darn close to 10,000 vs. 10,000. Flip it twice and who knows? HT,HH, TT, or TH? Generic warnings -- across people -- against insurance make the most sense to me with relatively inexpensive products. Electronics that middle-class people purchase at a big box store for 10s of dollars or a few hundred. For many such products, with few moving parts, the failure rate is very low. You can self-insure not because you know where you'll fall on the curve, but because you're deviating from a curve that's not very scary to begin with. You've got a relatively low chance of a bad outcome, and relatively low cost if a bad outcome occurs. And on the commercial insurance end . . . the transaction costs themselves may be significant if you're covering small, but not terribly unlikely, events -- so they end up being a bigger chunk of the question, each tie the risk neutral insurer asks "what costs do we need to cover"? (and then that gets marked up, more than once, etc.) For a nice electronic table radio, you might end up paying 30 bucks (objectively, real money) to cover 10 bucks worth of risk (objectively, expected harm), and why would you do that for each of 10 products if you could, in fact, afford to replace one of them should it fail? A car, a boat, a plane? Maybe you see it differently. 5 or 10 K in kitchen appliances? Leaving aside questions of the reliability of a given insurer or insurance product, I have no obvious answer to offer. CS surveys seem to indicate product failures ranging from about 5% to closer to 20% on dishwashers, maybe 6 or 7% to closer to 20% on various ranges, etc. Way under 50/50, but non-trivial. Then there's the cost of the policy and the cost of repair or replacement. Personally, I've not bought extra coverage for my RNB or DW or fridge, but I could see myself doing so, depending on the particulars.

Here's the thing.. If a buyer is very particular, then they will likely replace whatever was there. We just bought a new house and we went into it assuming we'd replace at least the range since I'm pretty picky about the cooktop and my wife is picky about the oven. We have some really good friends who is also our real estate agent(s).. it's a family business. They always tell us that nobody walks away from a deal because they don't like the brand of the appliances. It can certainly affect purchase price but it's typically not a deal breaker. For resale, you want something that looks nice at a decent price. Now, if you plan to "take it with you" and leave a gaping hole in the kitchen, that might pose a problem. I think you have two choices. Buy a cheaper range and fridge you wouldn't mind walking away from and live with it for however long it takes for you to sell. Then just buy new appliances when you move. The second option is to buy the range and fridge that you love and plan to take them with you. Then when it comes time to sell, put them in storage and buy something cheap that looks decent. Which way you go depends on what stage you are at. Are you actively looking for a new place and plan to sell when you find a new home? Is your house already on the market or going to go on the market soon? Is the 90% selling and 10% staying because you don't know if you can sell your house or is it because you haven't made the decision to move yet? If you don't sell now, how long (minimum) are you going to wait before trying again? My wife and I planned to move 2 years ago and when it didn't work out, we decided to do some work on the house including new cooktop. At that point, we decided it'd be at least two years before we tried again. We put some money into the house that would both improve our resale value and make living there more enjoyable. The most frivolous item, from a resale value perspective, was probably the cooktop since we replaced a 6 burner Viking with a 5 burner Bluestar. I just couldn't take the old cooktop anymore and we decided it was worth the money to make those two (or more) years easier. Forward two years to today. Old house sold in 4 days partially do to the upgrades we did. I'm sure if we'd kept the viking that wouldn't have changed but I avoided two years of frustration with the old cooktop. Unless you've already found a new place, I'd nix the idea of taking your appliances with you. There's just no way for you to know if they will work or if it's what you want. If you find a place that has a kitchen big enough to accommodate a 36" range, what will you do with the old one. I'd say live with what you've got or buy something that you can leave behind. Also, let us know what you've got now. It may not be worth buying anything at all if you are almost certain to sell.