If a company puts "Lifetime Guarantee" into the name of one of its products, you would expect the product to have a lifetime guarantee. But in the case of Bass Pro, Lifetime Guarantee is apparently shorthand for "If your lifetime guarantee socks fail we will replace them with an inferior sock with a 60 day guarantee."
A man who bought a bunch of "Redhead Lifetime Guarantee All-Purpose Wool Socks" is now suing Bass Pro for being deceptive.
From MidRange:
Per the class-action lawsuit filed on his behalf:
According to Defendant's current practices, when a purchaser returns the Socks pursuant to the purported Lifetime Warranty, Defendant merely replaces the Socks with a new, different pair of socks that only comes with a limited 60-day warranty (the "60-Day Socks"). Defendant has changed the design of the 60-Day Socks in order to differentiate them from the Socks—by adding a distinctive stripe pattern to them—presumably so that its store employees know that no warranty will be honored for those 60-Day Socks beyond the limited warranty period.
So yes, Bass Pro was replacing the lifetime-guarantee socks with pairs that were intentionally not as good as the socks that the person purchased. Worse, the guarantee was essentially invalidated on secondary pairs because the new pairs had worse warranties.
Slaughter apparently saw a distinct decline in the quality of the customer service as he continued to return his socks:
Customer service ultimately told Plaintiff—over his objections and demands that Defendant continue to honor the Lifetime Warranty—that he could no longer return the Socks pursuant to the Lifetime Warranty. Instead of honoring the Lifetime Warranty, Defendant would only provide Plaintiff with a different product: the distinctively-marked 60-Day Socks.
