An REI story:
My wife and I use our tents a lot. One of our tents used for bike touring is a lightweight, mid-priced 2 person tent that had carbon fiber poles. One of the carbon poles mushroomed on a tour, but we made it work until we finished the tour. We were going by our local REI on the way home, so I thought we would just stop and see if we could
buy replacement poles. I went to the customer service desk and showed the REI employee what my problem was. He made several phone calls, and informed us that the current model of our tent no longer used the cabon fiber poles becasue of the splittling problem; they now used aluminum poles. I asked about buying a set of aluminum poles. I felt that we had used the tent prettty hard over the last 4-5 years, and would have been happy to buy a set of replacemnt poles. He did some more calling, and said they do not carry replacement poles, and asked if I had the tent with me. I did have it, and the REI person said he would replace the tent with new one. When he opened my accout he said that I paid full price when I originally bought the tent , so he gave me a refund of $75 becasue it was on sale at the time. I walked out of the store with a new tent, and $75. That was under their old return policy, but I was still amazed.
Again, after 4-5 years of hard use the "new" tent needed some minor repairs, the netting had some tears, and stitching came lose. REI gave me the address of Sierra Designs' repair facility. Seirra Designs made the repairs for free, and even did some extra work in potential problem areas.
We have used those tents for close to 25,000 miles of bike touring, and a bunch of ski and back packing trips.
Note the carbon-fiber poles. Very light, but not durable This is the first tent, and it was almost new on our 2007 ride across the U.S. If you didn't notice, my wife keeps journals of all our ventures.