15 Million American Households Have Damaged a Device During the Holidays

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SquareTrade®, the #1-rated protection plan trusted by millions of happy customers, today released the results of a consumer survey about holiday device damage.

American households are particularly accident-prone with their devices during the holiday season. According to SquareTrade’s Holiday Survey1:

1 in 8 households in America have damaged a laptop, phone, camera or tablet during the holidays,
35% of devices damaged during the holidays were mobile phones,
Nearly twice as many iPhones were reported damaged during the holidays as Samsung smartphones, and
51% of damages during the holiday season is attributed to holiday activities
traveling (22%)
shopping (12%)
cooking (10%)
decorating (7%)

“It’s tough to be a device during the holidays – we were surprised to find that more than half of accidents were attributed to activities like traveling, holiday shopping, cooking and decorating,” said Ty Shay, SquareTrade’s CMO. “Retailers are expecting sales of over $640 billion2 during this year’s holiday shopping season, and no doubt much of that will go towards gifting high-tech devices like smartphones, tablets and game consoles – fragile and high priced items that apparently need extra safeguarding during the holidays.”

(1)Methodology and Data Sources 1) SquareTrade’s 2013 Holiday Pulse Surveys, conducted in September 2013 using Google Consumer Surveys. Feedback was collected from a total of 1,609 online consumers. 2) The Census Bureau’s 2011 number of households estimate and 2012 estimated US population. Please note: Number of American household and number of Americans estimates created using data sources 1 & 2.

(2)Source: National Retail Federation15 Million American Households Have Damaged a Device During the HolidaysFor more information on SquareTrade, go to www.squaretrade.com.