Nike watch repair

Rickshaw · Posted: Mon Jun 19, 2006 9:58 am

The saga of my Nike Triax Elite goes on, and I'm getting very annoyed at Nike. I originally paid about $280 for this fancy watch with its speed/distance monitor, heart rate monitor, wireless PC link, and software for graphing and analyzing run results. The electronics have been fine, but the watch seems to have been constructed very cheaply from a mechanical standpoint. Instead of a one-piece body, the watch is metal surrounded by a plastic holder that warped and pulled away within about a year of use. The strap is made of some brittle plastic that cracked and finally fell apart last week. For a fairly expensive watch, I'm disappointed.

All Nike watch repair is handled by a company called Parsec Enterprises. My first gripe is that they could not tell me over the phone how much it would cost to replace the body case and strap. I had to ship the watch to them before they would give me an estimate. Well, I just got the estimate today, and it will cost $112 to repair!

I could maybe live with the broken body case, since the watch is still usable, even though it looks terrible. But with no strap, I'm dead. I would certainly replace the strap myself if I could, but it's a custom design of the sort that Nike loves nowadays, fit at an off angle to the watch body, and molded just so to fit the watch's shape. A generic replacement strap wouldn't fit.

Although it feels like extortion, I will probably pay the $112 to have the strap repaired, since a replacement watch with similar features would cost far more. The same watch now costs $299 new, or around $160-$200 used on eBay. Similar products from Polar are about the same. The Garmin Forerunner 305 is about $250. But I wouldn't even consider the Forerunner to be a substitute, because it's not a watch you would ever wear just for telling time or setting alarms when not running.

Anyone else have any brilliant suggestions? What would you do?