Depends on where you live and your consumer protection laws. In some places there are laws/rulings stating that no, you don't need to keep original packaging - especially for statutory minimum warranties.
If there are no laws it's up to the discretion of the seller.
In the EU, to exercise your mandatory 2 year warranty, you are not required to use original packaging by law, but manufacturers may require original packaging to honor extended warranties.
Switzerland operates on trust. You go to the car service, you get the work done, you leave, you'll receive a bill in the mail later. There is trust that they do the right work and not overcharge you, and there is trust that you'll pay.
Just be sure to mark everything in the ledger, so the hut warden can replace it easier.
Being that close to nature long enough does things to a person. It's outside of something easily described with any human words.
And yeah, it's a high-trust society. In some farms you'll find a fridge where you can get local produce and leave your payment in the box. Especially so in the mountains where they make their own cheese. You'll find me lugging a nice cut of cheese back home from a Sunday hike. That box will be locked though, because there's more people passing than at a remote cabin :-)
This ethos percolates down, well beyond empowering the minority via direct democracy: its shameful on the individual to not carry one's weight. The smallest unit is the one to trust.
Contrast that to other collectivist societies, with top heavy bureaucracies, where the top literally cannot carry their weight (debt/deficits) and the populace is always looking for the biggest bureaucracy to rescue them.
There's no trust in people, because people are competing to weaponize the large state to screw... you.
Pretty common round here. (in NZ)
Often people just leave remote dwellings like that unlocked and stocked with supplies, sometimes with a signature book and/or donation box. For larger places some people even build a separate cabin next to the main house for travelers to use.
Then I go home to eastern Europe (we call it central Europe back home, lol nobody wants to be branded as east European since it reeks of russian association which for a long time means something very negative) and kleptocracy is visible literally everywhere on all levels of society, its nauseating beyond any tolerance from me... Its impossible for me to accept it once I've experienced much better society. One of the reasons to never move back and not raise kids back there, even if whole family is far (which is not always a bad thing).
Also the fact that most online businesses allow late payment via invoice shipped with the goods feels crazy.
Is the system different in Switzerland? Or has this one retailer decided to take on being a arbitrator of warranty claims?
Many manufacturers will also offer warranty service, and it is up to you the customer which you want to use. Often manufacturers try to persuade you to contact them first because it costs them less than a refund would (typically retailers just refund rather than attempt a repair or replacement)
You can often claim warranty with the manufacturer if you want; depending on the item. It can be faster to do so, but you're not required.
Exactly the same as with Amazon here in the UK then. They have every retailer in this country absolutely beat on their approach to customer support - it's always no faff, easy, often instant refund, none of this waiting 60 minutes on the phone to speak with unhelpful CS for any of the major retailers. John Lewis were the only ones approaching Amazon in the quality of their customer service, but recently that has changed for much worse and they are as hostile as everyone else.
Consumer laws give a much longer window, and the retailer is responsible for resolving the issue [0], but any time I've had to try and get something replaced after the time limit it's involved going back to the original seller, hoping they still exist in the world of random TM company names. Never understood how Amazon gets away with this.
0: https://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/advice/what-do-i-do-...
"The retailer is responsible If what you’ve bought doesn’t satisfy any one of the three criteria outlined above, then the retailer that sold it to you is in breach of the Consumer Rights Act.
This means that your statutory consumer rights are against the retailer – the company that sold you the product – not the manufacturer."
I also had some other service where they advertised a particular price, and after filling in my personal details to order the service there was suddenly an extra mandatory charge which doubled the total price. wtf?! This was 100% illegal. I stopped as that was too much for me and they even had the guys to call me out of bed in the weekend to try and sell me their stupid stuff. I gave an unfiltered version of my opinion on that.
Logitech actually ended up sending me two keyboards. First they sent me the same model but with a different layout (but still usable) and when I complained about the layout they sent me a more expensive model with the expected layout. No returns, few questions asked. Excellent RMA experience but that being said their mechanical keyboards AFAIK all have some sort of chronic issue and just aren't worth the price.
Anker didn't ask me to return the earphones but refunded only 1/3 of what I paid (6m remaining in a 18m warranty). Mixed feelings about it though the experience was positive. On general I expect things to last a lot more than the warranted period. Anyway I still have the earphones and they still work (with reduced functionality) so let's say that I remained with a residual + the refunded amount.
I bet somebody kept that GPU, fixed it, and flipped it.
Especially with components like mainboards or GPUs this could be awkward, because turn-around times were often weeks or even months. We usually just replaced them without too much fuss, and then a month later we were sent back a repaired spare part that could perhaps maybe be used for a repair later. We generally accepted this as a "cost of business", but never seemed quite right to me.
While turnarounds on laptops were usually fairly decent, they could also be weeks, and replacing a €800 laptop on which we made €50 profit was kind of a non-starter. This also included stupid stuff like broken memory modules, or a broken hinge cover. The only way we could get reimbursed at all was by sending the entire laptop to them and hope it didn't take them 2 weeks to spend 5 minutes replacing a broken RAM module or something silly like that.
My point in all of this being: it's not necessarily the store's fault.
Recently I had a set of headphones fail after ~1 year and all I had to do was find the item in my order history click a button, answer a few questions and in this case they just credited the amount to my account, didn't even have to send them back. Instructions told me to recycle them.
There is a certain amount of trust in the system.
However it can also go wrong. Once I sent a GPU for repair because a fan stopped working and it was still under warranty. Sadly they or their repair center marked it as a no fix, recycled the card and I was credited the amount I paid, sadly that was during the GPU crunch and a card that had similar performance was not available for even close that price. Replacing a fan I could have done my self but I thought a warranty claim would be the correct thing to do incase something else breaks.