in 2005ish, I went to Sears and picked up the most expensive bag vacuum. I think it was an elite something. 20 years later, I had to change out the hose once because I dropped it down the stairs and its been amazing.
If you take inflation into consideration, high quality products still exist at about the same price. Its just that there are now MUCH cheaper options now.
If you take inflation into consideration, high quality products still exist at about the same price. Its just that there are now MUCH cheaper options now.
I think the Sam Vimes Boots Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness plays a part as well:
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. … But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness.
As the saying goes, it is expensive to be poor.
If you take inflation into consideration, high quality products still exist at about the same price.
There’s another side to all this. We used to have appliance and, specifically, vacuum repair shops. Sometimes, the latter were franchise operations by manufacturer/brand. Electrolux and Oreck had stores that also did repairs, to name two. The business model had a lot in common with the auto industry at the time. To me, that stands as a cautionary tale of how things can get twisted around to cost the consumer more money in the long run, not less. I think it’s an important consideration, as old designs/patents were from and for a market serviced on all sides by this business model. But we can do better. If such products were designed to be user-servicable, there wouldn’t be a strong need/want to capture breakage as another revenue center.
So, we can absolutely bootstrap a new “buy for life” economy, but I think the downstream user hassle, repair, and secondary costs are crucial to consider.
Its just that there are now MUCH cheaper options now.
This is the part people keep ignoring. I keep calling it “realizing the actual cost of things.” Nowadays, you can buy cheap, but you’re going to get something fragile and packed-to-the-gills with surveillance and advertising. To get what grandma had (e.g. a refrigerator that runs for 50 years and just keeps food cold), anything cheaper than the inflation-adjusted equivalent costs you in other ways.
Meanwhile, over in the hobbyist and professional tool world, we’ve been saying “buy nice or buy twice” for a long time now.
There are also different standards when you care about the environment. Old school fridges used incredibly bad greenhouse gasses (R22 and R142B) and were significantly less efficient using approximately $250 MORE energy per year than a modern fridge (1750 kWh vs 450kwh) so only factoring in your electricity bill you could buy a $2500 fridge every 10 years and break even and if you got a cheaper fridge like a whirlpool you could get a new one every 5 years for 50 years
Don’t get me wrong there is still planned obsolescence but a lot of the older designs aren’t as perfect as people like to remember them being
I love buy nice or buy twice. I think Harbor freight gets a pass though.
The second buy can even be the nice one. If you’re unsure how much use the tool will get, buy cheap then upgrade after it breaks.
Great idea! Horrible for sales though. Plus no shareholder would wanna touch it with a 10-foot pole when they hear “customers first”
This is why you don’t do shareholders!
And stay small lol. I hate the corporate world (i work in it) but it is what it is
That’s a horrible plan for a start-up.
How do your investors cash out?
We need a buyitforlife… Sublemmy? I forget the term
Brother there are five
i think it’s just called a community but someone correct me if i’m wrong
That’s correct.
Porteus mills in the uk made such a good product they went out of business in the 1970s. And their mills are still used in the vast majority of distilleries in Scotland.
So, this is TOTALLY doable with two caveats:
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For most things, you’re going to need a variance on high-efficiency and pollution laws. Those old appliances weren’t sipping water and electricity, and their refrigeration cycles threw out tons of waste heat and used refrigerants that were super rough on the atmosphere.
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They’re going to cost 3 times as much as a current appliance. Those heavy metal fridges were expensive back in the day, they were equialent to thousands of dollars today with shitty freezers and manual defrosting. Cast metal and shipping are disproportionately more expensive than the used to be.
Optimize builds and manufacture after a order is made could work. Would be even more expensive.
Sell them uncharged. Up to the user to find the freeon.
or… art?
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Here’s a lovely british fridge from the 50’s: https://c7.alamy.com/comp/R2K1Y1/original-1950s-vintage-old-print-advertisement-from-english-magazine-advertising-frigidaire-refrigerator-circa-1954-R2K1Y1.jpg
the larger, budget model (250 liters, so about 2/3rd of a current single-door basic fridge) is 152 guineas. For those of you not usally paying in pre-decimal british currency, that’s 152 pounds and 152 shillings or 159,60 decimal pounds. Inflation from 1955 makes that about 2000 pounds/dollar/euros today.
No auto-defrost, no actually closing door, and a barely-adequate temperature controller. It did come in sherwood green though, with a kickass counter top!
Porteus mills made such a good product they went out of business.
This is the approach galanz did I think except the shitiest patents modernized.
Would a company like that go out of business from not selling the same shit to people over and over?
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They can sell easily replaceable components that will break down no matter how well built the appliance is.
If I made a toaster that costs $50 but every 5 years you replace the coil for $5.
Or one that costs $20 but you need to replace every 5 years.
You can imagine people going for the 2nd one.
Shit I was thinking more fridge or washing machine, things that costs thousands. I had 3 microwaves at one point in my life. Those I’m fine just buying again.
Mostly survivorship bias
Me when I have no idea how capitalism works lmao
Y’all are going to hate this, but IMO a more viable solution is a subscription model. The more reliable an appliance is, the less you spend on it in the long run, so less profit for the manufacturer. With a subscription, the more reliable they make it, the more profit they get. Then you just need sufficient competition to keep the subscription prices low.
Then you’d run into the same problem you have with insurance where they refuse to fix/replace your appliance because of “misuse” or something like that.
The problem here is the for-profit model that drives mass (over-)production and planned obsolescence.
We can do away with this if a company embraces a completely different model. Instead of doing the usual thing, go 100% on-demand with pre-orders, and only build what people want to buy. Then, keep moving horizontally into other product lines, following the demand and manufacturing need. Once pre-orders hit a given theshold, manufacturing starts for a given product. This eliminates all kinds of overhead and allows the company to survive by investing in multiple revenue streams. As a bonus: it’s a lot less wasteful since you never make more units than you can sell.
Subscriptions are like insurance and gym memberships. They’re profitable only if they represent value that is never fully realized by the consumer. They’re a really bad tax, and people dislike them for good reason. I want to buy a thing from a company, and that’s all; it’s not my responsibility to keep them afloat after that transaction.
Subscriptions are like insurance and gym memberships. They’re profitable only if they represent value that is never fully realized by the consumer.
Think of your monthly spending as a probability distribution. They provide value by reducing variance of that distribution at the cost of increasing the mean.
Consider at a more concrete example. You’re provided with two options:
- You get $100 a month guaranteed
- Flip a coin each month. On head, you get $200. On tail, you get nothing.
The expected value for both are the same, but option #1 is predictable. It’s the better option of the two unless you’re in a situation where getting $0 is effectively equivalent to getting $100. You would need to increase the amount you get in option #2 to make it worthwhile. Similarly, you can decrease the amount you get in option #1 and still have it be the better option.
By default, life is like option #2. The value proposition of insurance and the like is to give you option #1 with an amount lower than the expected value of #2, and in exchange, they get the difference as profit.
RIP Mole Richardson 💔
Most home appliances can be repaired even yet today. They all still work on the same principles that they did 60 years ago. Sure, the mechanical timers, switches and simple single phase motors have been replaced with solid state control boards, touch switches, and 3 phase motors, but those are also simpler to replace, if a bit harder to diagnose. The parts are a mere goggle away and for sale to even to the likes of me. About the only ‘impossible’ to repair at home appliance is your refrigerator. And that’s because of the sealed nature of the cooling system.
The biggest issue isn’t that they can’t be repaired, but rather you can’t be bothered to. You would rather spend $1000+ to get a new washing machine delivered to your house than spend $500 to fix the old one. You might consider fixing the old one if it would only cost $50 total and if the pump wasn’t $300+ labor and a $100 just to get a repairman to knock on your door. Plus the probable wait for a week or two to get the part. And you sure as hell ain’t going to get your fingers dirty or your knuckles skinned to do it yourself.
I’m still shaving with the same Gillette Slim Adjustable razor I learned to shave with as a youngster. It cost me about $10 in the early 1970s. The blades still only cost me about 15 cents per blade. I’ve had that razor for longer than I’ve been married to my wife of 40 years. I doubt few of you here would be able to make that kind of commitment to a simple razor, let alone a dishwasher.
Yes, most people who run a household can’t invest ressources in learning how to repair electronics (which can also be quite dangerous and insurance will not pay if you burn down your own home) and rarely can afford to go one or two weeks without a fridge or an oven or a washing machine. That’s not really on the people, though, so maybe don’t sound so snotty.
Simple hand tools like screwdrivers, pliers, a few small wrenches and sockets are dirt cheap. You don’t need to buy them off the SnapOn or MAC truck. In US, a store like Harbor Freight will have all the cheap tools you need for this. The most expensive tool you would find handy at times is a multimeter. Again, you don’t need a $1000 Fluke either. But, you don’t need one often. Nor do you need to buy all those tools at once either. Particularly if you start building your toolbag BEFORE you need it. It’s very likely you would burn your house down, (unless you are totally incompetent and really try hard), because you replaced a drive belt or pump seal. The control boards are low voltage and you should be smart enough to unplug any electrical device before working on it. And unless you tell the insurance company exactly what you did, they don’t know.
If you had bothered to read, I did straight up say that a refrigerator is impossible to repair due to how they are built. But you are still going to wait a day or two before your get a new one delivered.
Yes it sucks to not have a washer or dryer for a week or two, but while inconvenient perhaps, laundromats do exist. And a couple of trips to one while maybe waiting for parts is still a whole lot less cash money than the cost of a new washer or dryer up front.
I’ve only had one stove that didn’t last 20 years, (they are amazingly reliable and long lasting). I replaced it after 5 years because of a poorly designed circuit board, I replaced 3 of them at $175 each. But if you do, you probably already own some kind counter top cooking device or two. Like an electric frying pan, air fryer, slow cooker, toaster oven. or microwave.
I’m not particularly sorry you got your feelings hurt because you or anyone else got called out, if the shoe fits, wear it. So stop your whinging and trying to find ways to justify your laziness. It IS all on you to make the decision to repair or buy. But, don’t ever say that a lot of what you own can’t be repaired. That’s just not true.
But, don’t ever say that a lot of what you own can’t be repaired.
I‘m not saying that. I try to repair my shit. I‘m saying don’t be so condescending because self repair is not an option for most people if they‘ve full time jobs and kids, and need to learn a few things in the first place.
