Have mercy on retail clerks. To keep their jobs, they're often asked to push promotions they know most customers don't want, such as memberships and credit cards. Upselling looks good on a manager's ledger, even if it irritates a good portion of their customers.

If you've been shopping for smart TVs, laptops or just about any major piece of electronics in the past decade, you've no doubt been pitched on the idea of an extended warranty, AppleCare+ and Best Buy Protection being a couple of familiar examples. At a glance, they're more reasonable than most in-store promotions. Everything breaks eventually, and the cost of some repairs can be eye-watering. Just ask anyone who's smashed the display on their MacBook.

Despite this, you can safely skip an extended warranty in most circumstances. They mostly exist for the sake of an upsell, which you can tell by the strings attached and the fundamental nature of consumer electronics. When an extended plan is justified, you'll likely know before you walk in the door.

For starters, extended warranties are typically focused around defects, and any TV, laptop or similarly expensive device is likely to be covered by the manufacturer for 90 days to a year or more. This matters because if a product is defective, it's going to fail under relatively normal strain, by definition. You're liable to find out quickly if it's faulty, though there are obviously outliers.

Another point is that while planned obsolescence is real, a product that survives the first year is likely to survive past the two- or three-year window that's common for many extended warranties.

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