A coffee machine, 900 francs and a drive to Chișinău

I own a Miele CM 7750 coffee machine. Automatic, from the expensive end of the shelf — the kind of appliance you buy once and assume you'll have for ten years. After about two years and somewhere between three and four thousand coffees, one morning it put an error code on its screen and stopped making coffee.

The official service

I called Miele. A technician came to the house, free of charge, connected a computer to the machine, reinstalled its software, worked through the diagnostics. At the end he told me this was as far as he could get: the machine would have to go to the workshop to be diagnosed properly.

They took it away. A few days later they called with a price: 900 francs. The machine was out of warranty. Nine hundred francs to find out, essentially, what an error code means — it struck me as a ridiculous amount of money. I said no and asked them to bring it back.

They made another offer: 1,600 francs and I'd get a brand-new machine in place of mine. One that costs close to 3,000 in a shop. I turned that down too.

Then came a call I hadn't expected. They had spoken to the technician, and perhaps it could be fixed by replacing one part instead of two — so not 900, but around 600 francs.

That should have been good news. For me it was the moment something broke. If the price drops by 300 francs after a phone call, then the first time round I wasn't told everything. And this from an official service centre, of a premium brand, in Switzerland. I asked again for the machine to come home. It arrived two days later.

The garage

I thought: how complicated can a coffee machine really be? I took it apart, read what I could online, asked all sorts of AI tools, ordered a new pump and fitted it. It wasn't the pump. I got stuck, put the parts back, and left the machine in the garage, where it sat for months.

In the meantime I tried selling it as it was, broken. The best offer was 400 francs. I declined. I have no proof and it stays a joke, but it did cross my mind that the offer came from the very man who had diagnosed it :)

The drive to Chișinău

A friend from Moldova told me there's a Miele service centre in Chișinău and that it shouldn't cost a fortune there. This past summer, on the usual drive to Moldova, I put the machine in the boot — it's big and heavy, but there was plenty of room in the Tesla.

Customs weren't interested. Only at the Moldovan border did someone ask what was in the box. "A used coffee machine." That was that.

Once in Chișinău I asked Claude where such a thing gets repaired. It found me several addresses. I picked the Aaron service centre on Bodoni street. I'll admit to a moment of doubt when I arrived: from the street it looked like a phone and tablet repair shop. I left it there anyway — it was a Friday.

On Monday they called with a price: 2,500 lei. Roughly 110 francs. I said yes on the spot. They told me it would take a week; I explained that I was leaving the country and could only collect it in two or three weeks. They were decent about it: they did me a favour and repaired it in two days. No extra charge.

I took it to my parents' place, and that's where I switched it on for the first time. It worked.

The arithmetic

110 francs in Chișinău. 900 francs in Switzerland — or 600, with goodwill. Same brand, same fault, same coffee at the end of it. About nine times cheaper.

I'm not writing this to throw stones at Miele. The machine itself is good, and the man who came to my house did his job politely. But somewhere between "diagnosis" and "estimate", the price stops having much to do with the repair.

Epilogue

The machine is back in Switzerland now. In the meantime I bought something else: a La Marzocco Linea — a completely different animal, not automatic at all, one that asks you to pay attention. I love it.

So the Miele is for sale, working and in good condition. I've already turned down an offer of 500 francs. If you're interested, the listing is here, on ricardo.ch.

And the advice I'm passing on is simple: before you throw away something expensive, ask in two more places. Sometimes the second place is two thousand kilometres away and still works out cheaper.