New remote buttons wearing out insanely fast
My TCL tv's ROKU remote developed a hard to press button after 3 years of use so I went to Walmart and bought a 'voice remote' ( essentially the same as the original). After 3 weeks or so I noticed ...
Forum Discussion
Interesting. Roku products sold through Walmart end in RW, and that’s always assumed to have just been a “bookkeeping thing”. But I suppose it could be more. Both my father and I have spent time as product managers and we sometimes chat about how we have both had the experience of a major retailer demanding a lower price. We’d tell them the only way we could do that was to cheapen the product – drop a feature, drop a component, replace something with something cheaper. And the typical response was: Sure! Go Ahead! Our customers only care about the price! And we’d worry about the reputation of our company, but… they were a really big retailer… Not an easy decision.
The packaging and pricing is identical so they could all be made at the same factory this one does feel different - more satin than gloss feel.
I doubt there was a cost saving decision to put less conductive coating on the buttons but perhaps some machine spitting out a thousand units per hour was not calibrated properly and Walmart got a few shipping containers full of defective units.
The price I was talking about was the price to the retailer. Whether and how much of that they pass on will vary.
By the way, packaging can be be done by anyone as well. We used to manufacture and ship other companies' products straight to their distributors, all in the band-name company's packaging with the brand-name company's documents, warranty cards etc.
