KUDO 4 JADO

More than fifteen years ago, my wife and I did extensive renovations on our 100 year old Booklyn brownstone. One of the nice things we purchased was a Victorian-style kitchen fixture with hot and cold water faucets and a water sprayer. It cost hundreds of dollars. Our salesman said that it came with a manufacturer's lifetime warranty. We were seeking a period look for the kitchen so, despite our skepticism about the warranty, went ahead with the purchase.

All went well for the following decade and a half, until last year when the little round ceramic disk on the faucet that says "HOT" in florid Victorian script somehow cracked, thereby ruining the appearance of our pricey but wonderful fixture. I searched and called everywhere without success for a replacement part. I finally got a phone number for the company and called them, somewhere in Arizona. After emailing a photo of the fixture, they confirmed that it indeed had a lifetime warranty and that a replacement part would be shipped to me by overnight FedEx without cost. I couldn't believe what I was hearing! This was no fluke, because this year, around the fifteenth anniversary of our original purchase, the sprayer hose started to leak, and the same customer service rep cheerfully shipped a replacement part to me. The most remarkable thing was that I had long ago lost my original purchase receipt and couldn't provide any proof of purchase, and the retail store's records only went back 10 years. Thus, in the end there was a clear element of trust on the part of the manufacturer, which only inquired where I purchased the item and the approximate date of purchase.

Everything is now once again copacetic. My heartfelt thanks and admiration go out to JADO, a maker of expensive but high quality kitchen and bathroom fixtures for the home. They really do stand behind their products and lifetime warranties at a time when others often look to cut corners and take advantage of consumers. They make the old slogan-- "Made in America"-- something which the world used to recognize as a symbol of quality.

There are undoubtedly some products still produced in America of which we can be proud, but I conclude by contrasting my JADO experience with other long-term consumer items in our home which fall short by a wide margin. These would include a brand new gas range in the kitchen and a new washer-and-dryer set in our basement. Both were purchased around the same time as the JADO product. By contrast, these came with only limited warranties, which conveniently (for the company) expired prior to the "computer control panel" failure of these appliances. Together with the cost of a local repairman, each appliance cost between 1/3 to 1/2 of its original cost for a replacement part-- just enough to tempt consumers to dispose of the original and buy a brand new unit.