Getting Credit Card Warranty Service Without Going Broke

Do you have a credit card that offers an "extended warranty"?   Many cards, including Visa, Master Card and American Express offer this as a service.

It may not be worth your while. I'm sure VISA hopes it isn't.

Here's my (abbreviated) story so far:

I wanted to submit a warranty claim for a Canon all-in-one printer that stopped working in August.  All-in-One printers are great in that they combine a printer, scanner and fax machine all into a single machine with many, many more parts that can go wrong.

 I need pay to ship this 40lb. printer which is the size of an aircraft carrier, 
destined for a local landfill,  to you, so you the adjuster, can determine that its worthless and should 
go to a landfill in Indiana? 

Or in other words, 

 `Dear Potentially Scamming Cardholder, 
  We feel you may be in cahoots with the repair shop and might be trying to extort $140 out of VISA and
  buy a house in the Bahamas.
  Only we can determine junk when we see it'.


I had, in fact, kept the original box that I kept in the attic for warranty purposes so packed everything 
up and $45 later in postage, what I was now calling,  the Canon 140-BA ($140 Boat Anchor) was on its 
way to Indiana.

...

Amazing. Its been another week and I haven't heard anything back from claims 
department, even though I have post office confirmation that the package has indeed
arrived. I imagine it will take CSI Indiana some time to do a post-mortem on the all-in-one before it
gets a proper burial.


Total time wasted so far is 46 days, cost $75 so far, and its fairly plain that VISA wants 
the process so be so cumbersome that people lose hope and bail out at some point.

Sorry VISA. I'm sticking it out  just so I can break even on warranty service.

--

Update - Nov 13, 2010

Finally!  A check finally arrived today for $174.99 which covers the original cost of the product plus the cost of the diagnostic, but not the cost of shipping the broken product back to the insurance assessor. Still, its $120 net dollars I can put towards a new printer, which this time will be an EPSON Artisan 810 all-in-one printer/scanner/fax machine.   The date I first contacted VISA about this problem was August 17, 2010 so almost 3 months to get things sorted out. Glad its finally done.