9% of shops say guarantee, 7% of those say what happens if they break it

342 of 3,828 manufacturer websites make a guarantee.

24 of them say what happens if they break it.

I kept looking for the rest of the promise.

What the other 318 say

264 of them stop at the word. Sometimes “Satisfaction Guaranteed”, sometimes “100% Quality Guaranteed”, sometimes just “100% GUARANTEE” in capitals as a heading. Then nothing. It never says what happens when the work comes back wrong.

The capitals aren’t helping.

Another 54 stop at a term: a two-year warranty, a twelve-month warranty, a lifetime guarantee on the tooling. I’ll give that some credit. It tells a buyer how long the company will stand behind the work. What the company will do, I can’t say.

A guarantee is a promise about what you do when you’re wrong. Leave that part out and you’ve written an adjective.

The twenty-four

These finish the sentence. I checked every one against the page.

Winco Stamping has the sharpest one on the list. It puts a number on its own failure:

Deliver your products by the date we said we would or we will credit your account 2% of the sales price

I love that they’ve priced their own lateness. A buyer can see they’ve thought about missing a date and decided what they owe.

KCSP Machine:

We will replace, promptly and free of charge, any parts not done to specification

Kinetic Die Casting:

We will replace your die casting parts at no additional charge

Hydro Knife, on waterjet work:

100% satisfaction guaranteed
or we re-cut at no charge

Hydro Knife starts with the kind of empty phrase 264 other companies stop at. Then it keeps going: they’ll re-cut the work. That’s the promise, and it only takes the rest of the sentence.

Machine Matcher, on a diagnostic service:

If we can’t identify the root cause, you get a full refund

Summit Machine Company manages it in four words:

Will Replace Defective Products

You already know what you do when a job comes back

Writing one costs nothing. It takes no new equipment or certification, and no agency.

I’d probably start with what you already do when a job comes back wrong. You have an answer to that. So the work is just writing it down.

You’ve been eating that cost quietly for years. Put it in a sentence and a buyer can give you credit for it.

Under one shop in a hundred and fifty has written it down. That’s 24 of 3,828. There’s plenty of room.

I got the count wrong twice

The first draft said 96. My test counted any digit as a commitment, so “100% guarantee” got through just for having a number in it. A number with no consequence at all.

Then it said 25. Closer, but it came from a script I never saved with the rest of the work, so when the set of websites moved I couldn’t redo it.

So I wrote the counting rule down. A guarantee counts only if it says what the company will do when it’s wrong: a refund, a credit, a replacement, a re-run, work at no charge, or “you don’t pay”. I count a term separately, a warranty or guarantee with a length on it. It says how long they’ll stand behind the work and leaves open what they’ll do. On the current set of websites that’s 24, with 54 more naming only a term.

The correction makes the finding stronger. I’d still rather have gotten the count right the first time.

I checked every quote here word for word against the page as captured in September 2026. Counts are of 3,828 manufacturer websites competing for US work, which I read field by field.