I think part of the problem is that the hoi poi have gotten spoiled by folks that produce cheaper items, sell them at a very large markup and throw in, hey if you break it for any reason or whatever fine, we'll take care of it and just pass the cost on to everyone else since we have enough margins and volume to socialize the costs for folks breaking their stuff or rough handling it, oh and hey it will always be "free" (folks don't understand there is no such thing as a free lunch).
Originally, especially in the European and Japanese type laws, the buyer was also expected to be a responsible party and treat the item with reasonable care and not damage it or let it get damaged. "Warranty" was specifically to cover if there was actually a real manufacturing defect in the item that caused it to break or stop functioning as expected during normal use and a reasonable (but fixed length) time frame since everything ever made pretty much eventually can be made to wear out and break under usage.
For example, in my S&B scopes:
The issue with lubrication coming out of place and causing a spot on the lens = manufacturing defect that I expected to be covered under "warranty"
When I had a scope that had been used and abused for 5 years and run through a lot of sand and such and had the turrents banged around and such and was getting a bit gritty, well that was user caused degradation and I was happy to pay a reasonable price for them to take it apart and rebuild it and make it look and work like new.
But apparently "consumers" in the USA are becoming a bit of an entitled lots that think they deserve endless hand holding and nothing to ever be their fault.
There are companies that can easily cater to that because they make much bigger margins and pad the costs across a wider group of people.
There are companies that make higher end, more niche stuff where they don't have such huge margins and can't democratize the costs of stupidity across a wide group of people quite so easily.
I'm going to come at it from some other angles, not that you aren't correct for much of it, however I'm not sure I agree totally.
I venture to think there is still plenty of profit margin in expensive scopes from smaller co's but they aren't selling near as many scopes as the high volume co's. If the market demand is there for their product they are still making a ton of money. If they are putting out compromised optics well that's on them meaning less profit in sales, repair, and replacement.
Nor are the high end scope co's replacing or fixing as many scopes. Remember the parts and repair are at their cost which isn't expensive for them to do, and their scopes were designed to be repaired rather than being replaced only as a last resort and an extremely rare occurrence.
All that being said we still see these expensive scopes having problems and needing to be sent back sometimes, and supposedly not as frequently as the high volume co's.
For example I had to send a S&B 3-20 back twice and one of my S&B 5-25's side focus knob become too easy to turn necessitating a refocus after 2-3 shots so it needed to be sent back as well. However the warranty repair was free.
I only sent one Athlon back not because anything failed in it but because the prescription didn't jive with my eyes and they sent me a different model scope in the same product line at my request because I complained that a replacement of the original scope wouldn't work for me.
I've had twenty or more of this Co's scopes and I don't think this Co could stay in business for more than the reason that they'd have to replace most of the scopes they sold even though there is greater margin spread out over a lot of scope sales volume. I mean these couldn't be made that poorly, right, in other words that business model isn't sustainable for eventual replacement of every scope they ever sold?!
Aside from that a friend did have a less expensive G1 Argos wack out, and the Co sent him a brand new G2 version, which is a benefit as far as staying current with technology.
Which way would I prefer?? Not having to ever send a scope back, which isn't reality, and from that stand point I'd rather pay less money instead of paying 2-3-4 times the price for the diminishing returns a expensive scope offers, as nice as they are.
Now if money was no object, yeah sure, I'll take a high end scope on every rifle, which isn't reality either, even if one goes down once in a while.
They are all made by humans that make mistakes and a lifetime warranty being the most optimal IMHO, and rather to be had then a otherwise good warranty that runs out or has questionable conditions in damage or negligence.
I've had 5 March scopes, none broke (although there might have been questions concerning optical weirdness), and I'm glad they didn't go down because it'd piss me off to send one back to Japan, and until they have a USA repair center I'm tapping out. What happens if it gets lost going over seas, and how much is insurance gonna cost, will the insurance co come through with 100% funds, or if it gets damaged, or, or, or.
And I want any scope to be back within a few weeks at most.
Granted the few ZCO's I got behind were 1st Gens but I wasn't overly impressed, especially so with the lackluster turrets, so I got turned off right away. In fact my friend had to send his back a few weeks after getting it.
I haven't been behind the recent examples so.....
