How a $25 bonus became a $475 bonus
Some online sewing machine dealers offer bonus items with machine purchases that can look tempting, but may not hold up to close scrutiny.
In April last year, I decided to put myself in the shoes of an average customer and buy a machine from one of those dealers. I chose a Janome JR1012 which came with the following bonus offer:
The feet were not shown in any packaging but further down on the same web page there were pictures of feet in Janome packaging, so I imagined that the average customer would assume that the feet shown in the above picture were genuine Janome feet.
I could not have been more wrong. This is what arrived:
The 15 piece set was actually a set of cheap generic Singer/Brother/Elna/Janome feet. Using these feet on a new Janome during the warranty period could invalidate your warranty if there were problems.
But wait there’s more – I then found the same set of feet being offered as a bonus by an online sewing machine dealer in Singapore. And in that case the very same bonus box of generic feet was valued at $25:
And I understand that the $25 is closer to the genuine value of that box of generic feet.
So what are those bonus feet worth – $25 or $475 – you decide.