Okay, now it's my turn.
I want to tell people about how WONDERFUL Mueller Customer Service has been.
A couple of months ago, I bought an Eradicator from a dealer, and have been very happy with it. So much so that when I bought my Kimber 82G, I decided that I wanted the Mueller Target scope on the rifle, so I purchased one of those as well.
At first, I wasn't able to determine if there was a haze or something on the inside of the lenses, or if my eyes were just getting old. So, I shot the rifle and the scope for about two weeks, and I finally convinced myself that there was something wrong with the scope. I sent Mueller and e-mail, and immediately they said 'Send it back. Don't worry about the $12.' Well, we conversed a bit before I actually sent it back, because I wasn't really sure that there was anything wrong with it, and the technician and I e-mailed for a couple of days. He went out of his way to explain things to me about eye relief, the way the scope works, to make sure that I hadn't run out of elevation, and everything. I sent photographs to him, and his reply was 'Send it in, we'll take care of it.'
It got there on Thursday, on Monday I got an e-mail from them, the scope was defective and they were replacing the scope. Not only did they replace the scope, they threw on a set of folding eye covers for the ends for free. I have a new scope, no questions asked, freebies along with it, and a great customer service experience. Even when they forgot to put on my unit number for my condo, they got right on to UPS to make sure that it was delivered the following day (it shipped ground, and the driver should have known where I lived for all the stuff he's brought me!).
I have absolutely no problem with Mueller products, and yes I know they're made in China, what the heck isn't these days? Their customer service is great.
I especially have a foul taste in my mouth over this because we've just gone through something like this with the company I work for. A customer had an out of warranty product that failed, and he wanted to send it back for repair. Now, the difference here is that it was out of warranty. We gave him the basic repair price, and even before he sent it in, he was complaining that it was too much, but he agreed to the terms, sent it in, and it turns out that there was much more damage then he described, and the repair bill was about four times what he expected. We had to replace a major circuit board that made up over 1/3 of the system. Well, he called our company up, went off about how much we were charging him, and threatened to 'put it all over the web and tell everyone how bad we were and how bad our customer service was.' And he did. We may have lost some customers because of it, also, which is unfortunate, because just because he didn't feel like paying the cost of the repair, he bad mouths us.
That's what this feels like. Even before he threatened to take his problem public, I already had pictures of the unit to try to help him understand what the problem was. Eventually, we had to post them to a forum, very similar to this one (not gun related) to show 'our side' of the story. So, seeing pictures from Mueller doesn't surprise me at all.
Most products, not only rifle scopes, but almost ANY product today, will tell you that if you abuse, misuse, or otherwise damage a product due to neglect or other failure on your part, that the warranty is null and void. Mueller is no different than any one else.
Don't beat the company for one person. Unless you've been there to see what happened on both sides, then you don't know the whole story. I don't know the whole story, but I do know that Mueller Customer Service is fantastic.
Gary
