Originally Posted by
noodle soup
In the shop that I ran, Shimano outsold SRAM by over 10-1, but overwhelmingly the #1 shifter failure issue was with SRAM. Exact numbers I couldn't tell you, but it wasn't close.
The problem is well known in the industry, and luckily SRAM doesn't hassle most shops when they ask for warranty replacement parts. Often SRAM upgrades the shifter when possible.
My dealer ordered this shifter for me a year ago. Is it possible that the distributor that he got it from sold him an older shifter from old inventory? I have heard that some of the older ones had problems that they had supposedly redesigned and fixed.