Remotes

[bilmar]

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 the right arrow was requiring more and more pressure to work while all the other buttons continued to work with just enough pressure to trigger the button 'click'.

So, I returned it to Walmart and bought another - that one lasted 2 weeks before exhibiting the same issue.

The third one is starting to fail the same way after one week!

I am a heavy Youtube surfer so do use the right button a lot more than other buttons but surely the buttons should last more than a thousand presses before wearing out?

Did Walmart get a bad batch perhaps?

Since everyone sells these at the same price, are there any other Roku remote vendors that will likely source from a different factory than Walmart?

[bilmar]

Update:

I purchased a 4th Voice remote from Amazon and although it is the same model it feels a little different - the plastic is not as smooth.

Good news is that this one has not malfunctioned yet so I suspect the ones that are going to Walmart are different and poorer quality.

[Strega2]

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.

[bilmar]

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.

[Strega2]

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.