OFT To Re-Examine Extended Warranties Now That All Electrical Items Break on 366th Day

As inevitable as night following day

The Office of Fair trading today announced that it would be reinvestigating the extended warranty market, after noticing that everything that runs on electricity is now manufactured in China with an inbuilt self-destruct mechanism which kicks in on the day after the normal guarantee expires.

“We introduced legislation in 2005, forcing shops to make it clear to customers that these extended warranties were actually a super-expensive ticket for a lottery, in which you fervently pray that your toaster will explode,” said the OFT’s Claudia Berk. “We looked at the market again in 2008, and found that the average member of the public’s understanding of the laws of probability meant quite a lot of them were still cheerfully handing over enormous sums of money, in the hope that some dullard who left school at 16 with a ‘stiffcut’ will poke about randomly inside their valuable electrical purchases with a soldering iron and a pair of garden shears and bash the naughtiness out of it again.”

However, since 2008 the number of shoddy electrical goods which really do contain designed-in naughtiness has risen to 100%, she added, meaning that a £150 extended warranty for a £300 laptop might, incredibly, now actually offer something approaching value for money.