Fellow Campers
What I'm about to say is not in defense of Dometic, but more of a reality of being a corporation. Having lost my job from a 100 plus year old company facing a death law suit in the machine tool industry where product liability runs wild, I have some level of understanding of the situation Dometic must be facing.
And some things that may not be realized with the Dometic situation.
Dometic has almost a million units with this issue. That is a staggering number. It's obvious an error occurred along the way. Some decisions where made that where not good ones. Now what??
Something of this magnitude could completely wipe out a company. The "kit" costs something. Don't know how much but let's says, $100 in parts. $100 x 1,000,0000 = 1 lot of money. Even if it is $50 it is still 1 lot of money. And that is not the installed cost.
To replace the heating element, that alone at say a $25 cost is $25 million itself.
Then there are those with failed cooling units. How many millions are those?
This is a real complex problem for a company and a major cash flow problem.
How do they get out of this and not go under? People with failed fridges should get some compensation. And people with affected units should get a fix it kit. This is what seems fare and right.
The problem they are facing is how to help a customer in this day and age and not get slapped with so many law suits the company goes under.
If they do, all the employees who worked hard for many years are now unemployed. We have enough of that as it is. All then other product lines of Dometic get affected as well. They may even go under. The Dometic fridge worked well except this defect. If they go under, then we have no compensation. A very complex problem to say the least.
I do not know how to exactly do this or if it has ever been done before, but if they offered an "upgrade" kit at cost to help prolong the life of your fridge, I would buy it. Wouldn't you? Right now the fix, isn't even a fix to the underlying problem. It is to keep the lawsuits from taking out the company.
Anyone with some ideas on how to actually solve a problem of this magnitude?
If Dometic actually goes out, it might possible hurt the RV industry. Norcold I'm sure is not big enough to supply all their customers plus pick up all of Dometics. It will takes few years to build up that supply chain. And then all of us with Dometic fridges are totally out of luck until an after market company grows big enough to service them.
The word "recall" is a manufactures worst nightmare.
