- Standard Commercial Warranties
The idea that brands basically functioned as signaling devices, indicating the presence in commodities of acceptable quantities of potential utility, gains some support from the fact that modern branded products were typically accompanied by standardized commercial warranties. If attaching a brand to a commodity is, as suggested above, akin to a speech act performed by a company to the efect that it is taking responsibility for ensuring that its products can be relied on to be of a certain standard quality, then the commercial warranty put that commitment in writing—formalizing that responsibility.
Modern warranties can take one of two forms; they can be implied warranties, enforced by law, or voluntary commercial, “express” warranties. The implied warranty (about which more will be said in the next section of the chapter) is a legal obligation on the part of those who sell goods to ensure that those goods are reasonably functional. The implied warranty emerged quite recently and has become the default legal warranty attached to all commercial goods. It stipulates that products should be “fit for purpose,” and therefore “merchantable.” Express warranties, by contrast, are statements voluntarily made by the makers of goods about how those goods will perform in use. Typically, express warranties guarantee that goods will perform in the intended manner for some specified period of time.
Express warranties have a two-sided legal character. On the one hand, they are used by companies to unilaterally limit their legal obligations, by making explicit statements about the performance parameters of their products.21 The standardized commercial warranties that began to appear in the twentieth century were in part a response to changes in liability law that made manufacturers more accountable for mishaps resulting from the use of their products. One of the functions of the commercial warranty was, then, to specify written contractual limits to the liability of the manufacturer. At the same time, companies were legally obliged to make good on any statement about their products that they made in an express warranty.22 So if a warranty made claims about quality and durability that went beyond the legal minimum standard for “merchantable” or “serviceable” goods, the manufacturer had to ensure that its goods lived up to those claims.
188
Time for Things