Recently I was doing a search online for a particular scale. As I was searching I came across a new scale that I had never seen before. It was a price computing scale that was being sold for an absolute ridiculous price. I looked it over and read the specifications and took a look at the product pictures. I couldn’t help but recall the last super low cost price computing scale that I had found. It was probably ten years ago and it was by far the cheapest scale on the market at that time. I bought one and tried it out and it seemed ok. Anyway, we sold a few of them here and there. They did ok but to be honest to this day it is the most failure prone retail scale we have ever used. We get calls requesting replacement parts for this scale to this day.
This cheap scale that I just recently noticed also made me think of another scale that was the low cost scale of choice more recently. We sold a ton of this particular model and it was a good scale for the most part. Sure, it had a few failures from time to time. But mostly the failures were simple like a keypad, rechargeable battery, or AC adapter. All of which were pretty inexpensive. Our real downfall with this scale was the total lack of support that we received from the manufacturer. All they seemed to care about was “moving boxes”. I won’t go into great detail but it was one of the worst manufacturers we ever dealt with, and we basically deal with almost all of them.
So I guess my point in this article is to be careful. It’s your money so you can buy whatever item you want. Just understand that if something is priced really, really low there is usually a reason(s) that it is priced cheap. It could be low cost components, cheap load cell, poor quality control, foreign manufacturer, etc… In my experience with retail scales, most customers want a good deal but they also want to have confidence in their scales. The last thing you want to do is get ready to go out to the market each Saturday and fingers crossed, hope the scale makes it another weekend.
You might pay a little more money but I would feel a lot more confident carrying around a CAS or an Ohaus scale that I know was built using a certain level of quality. In fact, there are quite a few top brands like Detecto, Brecknell and Rice Lake that are good scales that are priced competitively and should provide you with good service. Hope you have a good time selling your fruits, vegetables and more. And I have to admit, I don’t love hot weather but I sure would like to get back to at least 50 degree weather sometime soon.
