I just saw a commercial for a locally-owned roofing company that offers a 50-year warranty on all their work. How does that work, exactly, with no guarantee that the company will even still be around in 50 years? Hell, the guy in the advertisement looked older than 50.
This is true for any warranty. The company that issues the warranty has to still be around.
Up to customers to decide how much they think a warranty issued by some company is worth.
You can buy roofing insurance. So can companies that do roofing.
I have no idea if this company has backed their guarantee with insurance. Probably not, unless the advertising rules in your jurisdiction force them to do so. If I was guessing, I’d say that they were using materials specified for 50yr lifetime, and that the installation guarantee was only good for the original owner anyway. But I don’t know: It could be anything.
None of the companies I’ve worked for have every had to have business continuity insurance for more than a couple of years, but it’s available.
Some roofs might be warrantied by the product manufacturer. Supposing the product is installed according to the manufacturer’s specs, they’ll warranty it for some period of time. Naturally there will be limits to this warranty since the quality of a roofing product is necessarily dependent on the quality of what it’s installed on.
I have an old slide rule in my collection with its original warranty card. “Guaranteed to be perfect forever.” That company has been out of business for over half a century.
That’s nothing–I own caskets that have a 100 year warrany.(I leave it to you to point out the issues wicasktcaskh that one.)
Presumably the company is dead certain they will pay out. 
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This is pretty typical, making long-term warranties non-transferable, or transferable with a surcharge.
Are they Certified Pre-Owned? Will you end up getting robocalls offering extended warranties on them?
In Texas, where foundation repairs are pretty common, the warranties get transferred to a new company. I have no idea how it works, but there must be some fund foundation companies pay into.
Is great-granmama really still using it?
This is a common issue with the solar boom and bust, especially here in Hawaii. The panels and inverters may have a 25 year warranty, but good luck finding anyone to repair or replace them once the company that installed them disappears.
I especially find M-Disc (Millennial Disc) optical disc claims of being able to retain burned data for 100 to 1000 years ridiculous. The original company started in 2009 and went bankrupt in 2016. The company holding the convertible debt restarted under a new name that same year.
So we’re at most 12 years into the lifespan of the oldest discs, well within the expected longevity of any 1st teir (now only Verbatim AZO and Taiyo-Yuden) writable DVD or Blu-Ray. If within the next decade, there is a significant rise in M-Disc failures, the new company can just say “Oops” and close up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
Edit: Yours Co. the company that owns, but didn’t develop the M-Disc technology doesn’t manufacture the discs. They only license the formula and technology to optical discs factories, of which there are few quality ones in existence today.
Please tell me that’s an auto-correct error.
Hm. Thought I had caught all of those. Since an “upgrade” of Android Firefox several months back, I’ve been plagued with a sporatic problem with the character buffer, where typing response slows and it will take sequences of characters typed earlier and insert them into the word I’m currently typing, sometimes repeatedly. In the above example, I was trying to type the word “with” and my character buffer was adding in “cask” after every letter.
Curiously, I was talking to a neighbour who is about to have his drive resurfaced. We discussed the various options and he said that he had two similar quotes and was minded to go with the one that offered a five-year warranty. A quick check revealed that the company had been operating for less than a year and my opinion was that it would probably only last until the warranty claims started to roll in.
I have some socks somewhere that came with a lifetime guarantee.
“This sock is completely worn out! I demand a refund!”
“Hm, sorry, looks like that sock is at the end of its lifetime. The guarantee no longer applies.”
Perhaps this is a European thing, where the business environment is less volatile than in the US in some respects, but I’ve lived in both Germany and the UK and seen in both countries lots of small locally-owned handicraft businesses that have been in existence for more than a hundred years. It’s typically a family where there’s a tradition that in each generation at least one child will learn the parents’ trade and continue the company. Quite often, those businesses bear a proud “established xyz” label on their vehicles or stationery, which is supposed to instil a sense of “These guys must be good” in potential customers. It doesn’t always deliver on that promise, of course.
Moved into a brand new house about 10 years ago. We were able to design, pick colors/brands, etc… 2 full stories with a 3 stall garage.
A few years ago noticed the vinyl siding was fading from a slate blue to a light purple. No problem, the siding we picked had a 20 year “no fade or free replacement warranty. Salesman said “yep, definitely fading” and started the paperwork. He then said “you realize the warranty is for material only, you need to pay for labor to remove and reinstall and any other materials needed besides the siding “. I said that is BS. He agreed.
Needless to say I have a house that is slowly turning purple.
The lifetime guarantee was a common sales pitch 20 or 30 years ago. As I understand it the trick was that to make a claim for what were usually low-value items you had to jump through so many hoops that it wasn’t worth the trouble.
Often, the warranty on a roof is twofold in that one is from the installer and the other, more lengthy warranty, is from the manufacturer. The installer may limit their warranty for a year or less and after that period, claims would be submitted directly to the roofing manufacturer subject to their limitations and exclusions.
A friend of mine once took a pair of shoes back to the shop when they fell apart after a very short time (like, less than 24 hours of total wear) and the person in the shop said “Oh, yeah, well, you’ve been walking in these shoes, haven’t you?”