Today is my daughters 9th birthday. Like any parents, my wife and I wanted to make the day a bit special and give her a nice present as is customary. We’re on a bit of a budget at the moment so this year we put a maximum dollar spend on presents for the kids and my wife did all the hard work of shopping around and doing her best to get a nice present that was good value for money. I thought she’d done a fantastic job picking out a big kids scooter until she told me yesterday that I needed to assemble it...
So yesterday I spent a couple of hours putting the thing together. It really should not have taken that long as it was supposed to be a fairly straight forward assembly and I do have the tools. I’ve put the kids bikes together Christmas before last in similar circumstances but I’m not really a “handy” type of guy. The big difficulty I had was getting the brakes to work properly. You need to position the brake pads correctly and get the cable tension just right...again, I’d done this before – but this time I just couldn’t get it working.
Turns out the rear wheel was a bit wonky. The axle needs to be exactly 90 degree perpendicular to the actual wheel, but it wasn’t. So that meant that if the brake pads were tight enough to work then the wheel rim would rub against the brake pads for half the rotation. The brake pads need to be loose so that the wheel can turn freely but that means the brakes aren’t effective. Needless to say my wife and I are both pretty frustrated. We had issues with Christmas presents being defective last year and I often rant about buying cheap manufactured crap from overseas...but we keep doing it because we don’t really make anything here in Australia. There is not much other option. China has pretty much cornered the market for manufactured goods in this country.
Of course we left it late to get this present sorted out. Life gets busy and we continually make the mistake of assuming that purchased goods will actually be good - or at least work. My wife has spent time online today trying to get a replacement wheel sent but because it was bought in store it has to be returned (in full) to that store. Places like Big W where the scooter was bought have a simple business model. It's Pure Retail so they just ship shit in and then ship it out. Getting a replacement part is not straightforward because they don't really have a repair workshop or a complicated inventory management system for parts. Just send it back and get a refund or a new one. Problem is, the store is over an hour away from where we live and we’re not taking 2+ hours out of my kids birthday to make a round trip to Big W.
So today my kid is riding around on a scooter without brakes. Maybe next week we can get back to the store and swap it out for a unit that isn’t defective….and then I can spend another couple of hours trying to put that one together before I find out if it is. The joys of consumer culture. You get what you pay for...