Quote:
Originally Posted by HiBoost
Understood, no apology necessary.
There have always been skeptics on here who take every opportunity to mock us for even paying attention to this stuff. And, understandably, there hasn't been much clarity on the actual scope of the issue (though I've long argued it's obviously far more prevalent than a "one in a million fluke"). But even I was "shocked" to imagine the problems being at a level where RSC staff are burning out and feeling hopeless. Clearly at that level reports would be making it back to HQ. How could there not be a solution at that point?
As I'm sure you know, the consensus from the naysayers has always been "if there's a problem, Rolex will make it right". There was the implication that if Rolex had not acted, it was probably just proof of how rare this problem was, or maybe that it didn't exist at all. But to imagine the scenario above, it is much harder to explain. Is this a fatal, non-fixable flaw? Or has the company simply changed its priorities to where making more watches trumps solving the problem?
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If I had to guess I’d guess the burnout problem is simply due to the unanticipated increase in workload. Even if only 5% of watches had the problem, it’s tens of thousands more per year than likely anticipated.
As to the “quiet fix” issue, I don’t think much of the lack of communication. Yes, we’re often think in car analogies, but nobody potentially explodes here. There’s no safety issue if Rolex continues selling already-constructed movements that have a batch (or ten) of faulty parts distributed among them. Thinking probably is that less time and materials wasted fixing them one by one vs discarding our rebuilding thousands already produced and awaiting casing.
Convenience aside, it is highly likely that all that are destined to fail will do so under warranty, so the customer is out very little. It’s not like with cars where “well, it’s unlikely to start on fire, and even if it does, it’ll be a small fire, and we’ll repair it under warranty” is an entirely unacceptable position to take.