I've only ever talked to one echo dealer, and this is anecdotal, what he told me. For years he sold echo stuff, along with a lot of other stuff, he has a hardware and appliance store, a little of everything. TVs to woodstoves, garden tools to fridges. So he used to eat real minor repairs on his echo line to keep his customers happy and speed things up. He never bothered to turn in a single small echo repair. Not a lot, just the real small stuff that wasn't hard to do, and he said, that's all he ever got, that their gear was pretty good. So one time it finally happened, he gets a major warranty claim for a blower that would necessitate just a replacement, so he turned in a claim. Echo come down on him hard, said he had skipped tech training and so on (while still selling him all their stuff and keeping him as a dealer). He said he felt so abused by them, the verbal abuse on the phone, he quit them on the spot. He gave the customer another blower out of his own pocket, and that's it.
So, a single major claim in years, they harangued him, so he quit, and he sold their stuff for over a decade.
FWIW
...Bob
