Unfortunately, lifetime warranties don't guarantee high-quality product.
Exactly. If you can make your warranty annoying/expensive enough to get item replacement under, or put enough weasel-words in the fine print, you can stick a lifetime warranty on anything. How many people will pay $20 to ship off a failed $30 item, and wait 3 months or more to get it back? How many will do it the second time?
Ridgid tools brag about a 'lifetime warranty', but it doesn't cover 'regular wear and tear', and indeed in their fine print they say something along the lines of 'unless it fails very shortly after purchase, failure is nearly always the result of regular wear and tear.' No experience with trying to use this warranty, and I've used a lot of their tools owned by friends, but this put me off buying some...
'Theoretically this level of creeping Orwellian dynamics should ramp up our awareness, but what happens instead is that each alert becomes less and less effective because we're incredibly stupid.' - Jerry Holkins