I work in the customer service section at fry's electronics, and I can tell you our side of the story. In general the manufactures warranty is just that, a warranty throught the manufacture. Which means it has to be shipped to them and they will ship a new product in return. I dont know any store that would swap it out after three months. The longest retail return polices for electronics are 90 days , and places that follow that policy are very strict about it. Try to argue with wal-mart with a late return, there company is worth so much more than ours and they are the worst kind of asshole when it comes to return policy.
We even have a seperate department that deals with rebates. If it takes longer than a couple months to get a rebate come into the store, and we will contact the company and see why you havent recieved it. If the company says that they wont honor the rebate, we will honor it in store with either a store credit for the rebate amount or cash from our registers. The reason why we dont just take shit back and RTV it is because everything in the store is already paid for by the store owner. Fry's is privatly owned so everything in the store is ours, unlike other stores that recieve items from manufactures on a finance system. when we send items back they charge a large percentage.
I would recommend to anybody purchasing any type of car audio from fry's to buy an extended warranty from us. This way when it's two years old and your amp blows you can come in and exchange it for a new one, no questions asked. And the one we give you will be better than your old one most of the time because of how often technology changes. If you still don't understand the way we look at it by now i'm sorry, just try the same thing somewhere else and see if the out come is much better. Especially considering that people abuse the shit out of car audio equipment.