How hard is it to do quality testing on a watch?

[Fiona]

I recently bought a $100 watch from Nike. It was cool. Looked good, had some nice features.

A few days after I got it, I started playing around with it and noticed it had the day of week wrong. The date seemed fine, the year seemed fine, the am/pm setting was fine. The 12/24 hour setting was fine. But the day was wrong. On saturday, it said it was Friday.

I pondered. I tried setting it again. Still wrong.

I go to their website and look around. After literally half an hour, I locate an email address for customer service (after reading all the FAQ's on their line of watches to see if I'd missed something obvious.) So I wrote with my problem and got this response today:

Hi Fiona,

We have been informed of a programming glitch in the date with the Nike D-Line series watches. The date programming for the watch did not account for this year's leap year, causing it to be one day off. There is no option to fix the date manually, but on January 1, 2005, the watch will self-correct and provide the correct date from then on.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you. If you have any questions, please feel free to give us a call at 1-888-350-6453. We are available Monday through Friday, 7:00 a.m. to 3:50 p.m. Pacific Time.

Sincerely,

Dean
Nike Timing


So they knew about this, but didn't bother to recall the watch. They were evidently unable to TEST the watch for leap years. And I don't know if the watch will be wrong again in 2008.

For a $10 watch, I wouldn't care, but $100 is (or SHOULD be) a pretty decent watch. Idiots.

[complain jane]

1. I bought an MP3 player from Nike a few years ago,

and it simply stopped working in about a year. I found out someone at work had the same experience, and he told me he knew lots of people who had bought them and had the same problem. Yeah, idiots.

[Fiona]

2. Ugh

well I sure won't spend another dime on Nike electronics.