I kind of wonder who writes Lidl's manuals, because they're really quite good, and sometimes straight-up include several pages of theory behind how and why a certain tool works
@joepie91 the Silverline stuff is awful but yeah, the other stuff does tend to have nice manuals
@gsuberland Huh? Silverline? I don't know that as a Lidl brand
@joepie91 sorry, silvercrest not silverline.
@joepie91 it's their appliances brand. started out with media stuff (DVD players, headphones, etc.) in the mid-2000s and spanned out into home appliances later. I worked there for five years and the return rate was extremely high.
@gsuberland Ohh, right. That's interesting, though - of all the Silvercrest stuff I've bought since 2018 (which is quite a lot!) I think I've only ever had to file a warranty claim on a single product, slightly over the 3 year mark (which was promptly fully refunded as they didn't stock it anymore). Everything else has worked flawlessly for many years.
Likewise for the Parkside stuff (which I also have quite a lot of!), virtually no issues with anything other than that the out-of-factory accuracy of eg. jigsaws is a bit dodgy sometimes.
Very curious where specifically you worked, though - it never became 100% clear to me what the company structure behind the Lidl non-food stuff was, how many contractors were involved, where it was sourced from, etc.
@joepie91 I was in retail and I left in 2011, so I'm rather out of date.
Lidl refers to this stuff internally as their special product lines. They have offices in China and Bangladesh which are where they manage those products. AFAIK it's all rebranded OEM stuff and they don't have any first-party factories.