Be aware that survivorship bias may fool you when comparing the quality of new and old items. The single juicer that lasts 70 years may be the only one of its kind to last that long, the others from the same production year being left to rot and rust in a landfill.
That being said, I definitely believe that planned obsolesence and unintentional bad quality is a plague on modern consumer items. I am lucky enough to have the time, knowledge, persistence and money to research and buy long lasting goods. For example, I have bought kitchen knives made out of a single piece of metal, which are therefore less prone to breaking than the run-off-the-mill ones. My jeans are from a Swedish jeans company that offer in-store repairs as long as it's practical. This is saving me money and effort in the long run. However, I do not believe in such individual solutions to what is essentially a systemic problem; people should expect good consumer items without researching beforehand like it was their hobby.
I'm glad that the EU is working hard on right-to-repair laws.
I used to think if you looked hard enough and researched things, maybe paid more sometimes, you could get around it. I still think that is necessary, but not sufficient. It won't save you; you also need a bit of luck.
My biggest bugaboo in this area is with clothes. At some point I started being more careful, but found the published specs won't help because they don't actually tell you everything you need to know, or the company selling them is being defrauded themselves by manufacturers making things out of spec. In many cases too I'm convinced people have lost communal knowledge of what good items look like because theyve never seen them. So, say, they're happy with a sweater that is made out of very poor yarn that obviously won't last because it's warm and has a good zipper. We're at 2/3 now I guess.
However, even places like Consumer Reports will say they don't recommend an entire class of appliance, but then proceed to provide ratings, that are ostensibly good. How are those supposed to be interpreted? "None of these are worth buying but they are 95/100 in quality if you take that into account"? No wonder people are confused.
I've bought clothes from reputable vendors, with fabric from named mills to specs that should be quality, and found instead the cut was off spec and wouldn't fit. Or something about the fabric just didn't last anyway. It seems like it's always something, like I'm constantly being tricked in some new way once I figure out some other problem. It's such an enormous waste of money, time, and resources.
People forget things used to cost a lot of money. I remember when our family bought our first color TV set back in the early 70's. You can buy a 65" HDTV set today for the same amount of money - and that's in today's dollars which are significantly less valuable than the dollars in the early 70's!
That TV didn't last 20 years - it was a huge hassle continually testing and replacing tubes.
Meanwhile I bought a 55" HDTV almost 20 years ago that's still running fine.
Metal, vs plastic gears. Bigger vs tiny electric motor. Metal vs plastic moving parts in contact with the fruit. Plug-in vs battery powered. These are the things that I would place money on as the reasons the 70 year old one is still functioning, and none sold today will work in 5 years. (I’ve never looked at one of these items. I’m just guessing. But I’d still place money on it.)
Quality manufacturing in the Good Ole Days is a myth. The Japanese are our lunch in auto in the 70s due to a lack of Quality.
Planned obsolescence is a thing. So is building or making for the short term. There just wasn’t this great era where people made things for the long haul out of pride or something else. People always took the short term view when the market structure or incentives encouraged it.
I'm really rooting for getting the onslaught of rubbishware to end but don't see the right to repair laws making a dent there. Those laws are engineered to make it possible to repair complex, expensive things. Dealing with intentionally misengineered things that are trash cheap is a completely different discipline.
I'm willing to bet that the "survivorship bias" of old products narrative is being pushed by modern planned obsolescence companies; back then people were still figuring out how to make a successful company, and many companies believed that if you made a product that lasted forever people will tell their friends and those friends would buy their product and so they would be rewarded for a job well done, now there is not a single company that believes that, the results came in and economically it makes much much more sense to make stuff that breaks after a few years, so no; I don't buy for a second is survivorship bias, at least not in most applications.
> Many blamed these problems on the government. They believed it had crippled certain products (major home appliances, especially)
This is a claim that was already present in Death of a Salesman. Here's the quote:
> I am always in a race with the junkyard! I just finished paying for the car and it's on its last legs. The refrigerator consumes belts like a goddam maniac. They time those things. They time them so when you finally paid for them, they're used up.
The play came out in... 1949.
It's not been my experience that everything is crap nowadays. But of course one needs to shop wisely.
If you're willing to tolerate not owning things when they're new, survivorship bias can be your friend. I especially recommend saying yes whenever an elderly relative / friend offers you a hand-me-down. You'll get things that are no good, to be sure; sometimes trash survives because people have inexplicably taken delicate care of it for decades. But often, you get things of great utility. Wool army blankets from the 1940s. Brace-and-bit drills. Old sets of Encyclopedia Britannica. A flour sifter. A nightstand. A handmade rug. A shearling coat. A sharp machete. Furthermore, accepting these gifts is an act of love; it tells the giver, "it was not in vain that you cared for this thing you can no longer use."
I have a set of "spade" drill bits for wood that once belonged to someone's grandfather. The operation of this style of wood drill bit is sometimes jokingly referred to as "slapping chunks of wood off" until a hole appears, and I agree - for the ones sold now. Not these ones.
They're noticeably sharper and truer than the ones you find now, more perfectly symmetrical in profile and grind, probably a half-dozen other subtle differences. When you drill a hole with one of these bits, all of the shavings are uniform and the sides of hole aren't ragged. There's less vibration, less heat, more progress.
This is great advice! Over the years, most of the shiny new household goods from our wedding registry have ended up donated or binned, and more and more of what we use every day is either inherited or bought used. Estate sale cast iron cookware and shop tools, inherited fiestaware, utensils, and dining room table, a commercial deep freezer from Alejandro's used appliance store.
When inheriting or estate sales aren't an option I've actually been buying a lot of used stuff off of eBay lately. PC's (the trick is to select "no OS included" to find the business ones IT departments are discarding), a label maker you could use as a bludgeon in a pinch, a vintage flannel that's actually wool.
I've come to really like second hand. Clothes don't shrink when you wash them, boots are already broken in, and things have generally survived past that first failure spike that weeds out the lemons.
My $4000 GE refrigerator has broken twice now in the five years we have owned it, both times in the exact same way. The way the fridge works seems simple: the cold freezer is on the bottom, and then a fan blows air up through a shaft to the relatively warmer refrigerator as needed to keep it just above freezing.
Instead, the failure state is that the fan that handles this broke with no warning. I lost a bunch of groceries, but luckily managed to figure out the issue and replace the part myself.
Then a few months ago I heard a clack clack like a fan was about to fail, so this time I replaced the fan after only about two days of no refrigerator.
I don’t understand how such an expensive device can have such a terrible failure mode that ruins basically everything inside my fridge, twice now (the freezer is fine though, it just gets colder).
Before this fridge my wife and I were totally broke and just had a $400 hand me down fridge that we literally never had any problems with. I don’t really know why modern stuff seems so bad.
I know I know, survivorship bias and whatnot, I don’t see all the broken refrigerators in the landfill, but even if that’s the case why not fire half your design engineers just trot out those old 1945 GE Ultracool (or whatever) designs and sell those?
Original PYREX was borosilicate glass which is extremely resistant to shattering due to temperature differences and therefore excellent for cooking.
The brand and reputation of quality was established. Time to profit. The brand was sold and gutted.
The material was replaced with cheaper soda lime glass, which if you google “exploding Pyrex” you will discover is dangerously far less resilient to temperature changes.
Presumably out of shame the brand changed to pyrex from PYREX except for lab glass which retains the capital letters.
Current car is at 202,000km and 11 years and essentially nothing has gone wrong with it except normal wear and tear replacement and it isn't even (in this road salt envioronment) noticeably rusty and it's never even had a spark plug out. Try that even 30 years ago.
On the other hand, motorized kitchen appliances really seem to be designed to be about 0.0001% better than the absolute minimum reliability requirement, lest a few extra pennies of manufacturing cost be wasted. That said, there are still gems. I have reason to hope that the current version of the Braun hand mixer is as good as my 20+ year one. I've had to open that up to resolder a transistor that had shaken loose due to vibration - design error; this heavy component should have been better anchored - but the mechanicals run as if it was new. One the other hand, the design of Braun food processors leaves me with little confidence in their long-term function.
When the delivery guys showed up with the fridge, 17 years ago, they said don't expect much, 10 years maybe. 17 years later the plastic parts on the outside are yellowed and cracked and the door seal is showing its age too, but it still works just fine. And I suspect chest freezers are still as good as they always were i.e. work for many decades (while consuming less power).
I'm not hopeful about the replacements for the washing machine (2000ish) and dishwasher (1987ish) when they wear out.
The thing in this space that has always bothered me was the simple can opener. (For those not in the US, yes, in the US we still need can openers.) The new ones which can be purchased in the grocery store break within a month or two. I don't even want to think about modern electric openers. I found a used vintage can opener from the 1970s on eBay six years ago and use it practically every day; as it was used it cost less than the shiny new ones in the store. Maybe there are modern high quality non-commercial can openers but they aren't at the grocery store or Pampered Chef or any of the other kitchen appliance stores at the local mall.
I don't quite know what to say to what I found near the end in this article:
> Recently, my wife needed a carrot peeler. She needed one rather quickly. Off to Target. The one she bought (the only one on sale)...
I stopped at the phrase "the only one on sale". Inevitably the next part reads:
> looked handsome enough, and the brand was one she recognized, but it failed in the useful department, miserably. It wasn’t sharp enough to peel a carrot.
Is this deliberate, or did the author not notice a core problem right there, in their own shopping behavior?
As for coffee grinders, I've got a Eureka Mignon and machines like that are expected to last a few decades easily, with a little bit of maintenance. If you buy the $99 stuff, well...
Especially in the kitchen some good stuff still exists. It's expensive, heavy - and lasts. Unfortunately you won't find those in many of the regular shops. In my city - Nuremberg, Germany - I only see that kind of (expensive) quality in a single specialized store (Kitchen Loesch, https://www.kuechen-loesch.de/). I myself was not aware of the kinds of good appliances that are still made until I went through the lower levels of that store for the first time. I too only knew the stuff most people know, which does not last long, visible at first glance already, with all the cheap plastics it's made of. Much of the better stuff is heavy and mostly made of metal. Even the hand blenders there almost all cost above 100 Euros, far more than I was used to seeing. On the other hand, those devices looked like they would last for a very long time, not like that shitty plastics Philipps model I own. Unfortunately it's not nearly the same to see pictures online, having the actual appliance right in front of you is very different as far as I can tell after that experience of actually seeing them there. The impression of solidity just does not transmit via some online shopping website picture.
I noticed the "only one on sale" thing too. I suspect the author meant it was the only one for sale at the store, period, not that it was the only one with a sale/discounted price.
You are right but this very much reinforces the saying "it's very expensive to be poor". $99 for a coffee grinder is a lot of money for most people. At the US minimum wage it's almost 17 hours of work, after taxes are taken out. So all they can afford is the cheaper version but then they have to consistently purchase a new one so end up paying more over time. Pretty interesting phenomenon.
> As for coffee grinders, I've got a Eureka Mignon and machines like that are expected to last a few decades easily, with a little bit of maintenance. If you buy the $99 stuff, well...
All the fawning over the Niche Zero grinder does my head it - its using a crappy brushed DC motor and a plastic gearbox more akin to the quality of a $100 sunbeam conical burr grinder I had.
And like my Sunbeam grinder the gearbox will likely start to get very very noisy after 10 years of heavy use, not to mention needing new brushes at some stage which aren't user replaceable.
But hey, one youtube guy said some good things about the Niche so it must be the best!
They also complained about pyrex not being durable because they dropped it. My pyrex has lasted 2 decades of use and I think it's an example of a durable product.
She was sold a carrot peeler. She didn't receive a carrot peeler.
It's not relevant what the price was: that's a decision for the shop. If they can't sell carrot peelers at a price that makes sense for them, the answer is to not sell carrot peelers, not to sell things that are described as carrot peelers but which cannot peel a carrot.
People are mentioning survivorship bias. (i.e. we notice old products that work well because they're still working, and don't notice the ones that failed since they're in a landfill.)
I wonder, could the opposite reason account for all the companies selling crappy products? Could it be that all the companies that made the really high-quality products that last generations died out because they didn't have a sustainable business model?
It could be that creating a truly high-value product is expensive and selling one that never needs replacement isn't sustainable. Maybe after a while you run out of customers: the ones that are still happily using the product you specialized in making an expensive high-quality version of for life, just don't have a reason to buy another.
Thus perhaps the only companies that survive are the ones who have customers who keep rebuying after their products break.
How can customers help e.g. a refrigerator company survive, if they only buy one from them ever?
Cheap imitations of an artifact from a bygone era. Where playing with it too much or too hard will it break.
They're more of a display item than an actual appliance. Only meant for looking at and instilling the idea of a useful tool. But don't dare use it!
The reason is producers don't care if it works or not. The product is successful so long as they can trick enough people into buying it.
The mental, emotional, and financial exhaustion borders on psychological warfare from foreign advisories.
America needs to reboot it's manufacturing base with a focus on absolute best quality hands down, no excuses, survive nuclear winter American made products.
Let's break this wasteful Earth destroying, GHG creating cycle of madness!
Who was the guy that said "humanity signed its death certificate once MBAs found out that they can literally sell trash as long as it is cheap enough to make it inconvenient to return"?
I got a wire cutter/stripper recently that gave me that exact feeling: "This isn't a real wire stripper, it's a non-functional replica."
(It's the kind that has a little adjustment screw/slider to set the diameter of the wire you're stripping. Only it's impossible to set the screw correctly because turning it to tighten it forces the slider to shift position. I wrestled with it for an hour and then ordered a different one. The handle plastic is weird too, it feels "icky" somehow.
BTW, the new one, which works great, was the same price as the unusable one.)
The unusable one is not worth returning. And what are they going to do with it if I did return it? Throw it away? Sell it to someone else?
> And the world took the loss. A small one, but they add up.
Again, that's exactly how I feel about it. What a waste, to dig up the materials, forge them into this device, send it who knows how far back and forth over the Earth, just so I can throw it back into the Earth because it's not worth fixing it. It's fucking depressing.
I've got more anecdotes: a brand new soldering iron that doesn't solder; an aluminum folding beach chair that broke when unfolded for the first time; an air fryer with a custom grill that rusted in less than a year and can't be replaced; etc...
As far as I can see, you have to go out of your way to find the manufacturers and retailers that care about quality (and repeat business) and patronize them exclusively. Don't give any more money to the folks who are ripping you off. Instead, reward the folks who are doing the right thing. You're going to pay the overhead anyway either by doing your homework or by throwing away time and money and garbage items.
I have empathize with the author's plight, but I don't have much sympathy for him buying multiple coffee grinders and throwing them all out because he bought cheap ones.
> I can’t say the same about my coffee grinders. I use the plural because I’ve owned a lot of them, all bought in their original packaging and dead within a year. They’re good ones, supposedly, with burrs not blades, but they stop performing before long, ending their long journeys from overseas factories in unmarked graves in my local Montana landfill.
A Baratza encore will last literally forever, and if it doesn't, you can replace everything in it.
The existence of a Cadillac product doesn't refute the proliferation of absolute crap. Somebody sells a coffee grinder, it should grind coffee for years. No exceptions.
I have the exact same sentiment when it comes to the Baratza line of products. I have the Preciso, which is similar to the Encore. I have rebuilt parts of it twice and you could build a unit from parts if so desired. In fact, they should consider offering DIY editions ala Frame.work for enthusiasts.
Part of the reason we equate "old" with "good" like that 70 year old juicer is survivor bias. We don't dig through the landfill to find out how many broken 70 year old juicers are buried there.
That said, I suspect that in another 70 years, Walter's juicer will still work, but you won't find any working examples of juicers from 2022.
It should be obvious to most people at this point that any appliance with the word "smart" in its marketing really means "smarter than you, sucker".
Isn't there something to be said for the volume of anecdotal evidence of older appliances of higher quality? Like, is it really survivor bias if older appliances have a (perceived) significantly higher probability of lasting? Sure, some items may not have lasted, some may be flukes, but if you compare the relative quantities of "older appliances still working" vs "new appliances still working", the proportion of older appliances to the total from "that era" is likely much higher than now.
I have no evidence to back my statements up, and I'm using extremely vague language, but this is at least my perception of this idea that "they don't make 'em like they used to."
I think the degradation in quality could be a result of advancements in marketing. With such powerful tools, the determining factor for winning products is now marketing not quality. The marketing arms race incentivizes companies to invest more in convincing customers their product is better and invest less in improving their product.
Besides echoing the survivorship bias warning in other comments, I'd like to point out that just a bit of skill and will can turn the fate of a lot of this 'crap' around.
Dull peeler? Sharpen it. Now you have a sharp peeler that can probably last 10 years with occasional attention.
Dead grinders? I'm sure at least one of them could've been fixed and extended its life significantly.
Sure, things are getting less and less repairable, but most still can be fixed of some common faults. It just takes a pinch of skill and a bunch of will.
We got a hand (immersion) blender. Plastic gear to the metal shaft. Stripped out. Non-repairable. Can’t find one without a plastic gear. Meanwhile, mother-in-law’s is metal and who knows how many years old, still working fine.
My house came with a large high quality washing machine from the 80s I’m pretty sure, or maybe even earlier. It crapped out at some point last year, and we were about to buy a brand new appliance, but I did some research, got out the multimeter, and was able to diagnose a blown fuse caused by a faulty part (replacing the fuse just blew it out immediately). I ordered the part online and installed it and now the washer has been fine since then. I don’t think this would have been easier with a newer part.
I did this with my washer for years and kept it running until it was 20 years old. One day it broke again and I knew from experience the part that broke would take hours to fix. At the same time Lowes was having a sale where the fancy new units were on sale and included 5 years of 100% paid for labor and parts maintenance.
The new washer / dryer wash more clothes at once using less detergent and far less electricity. They're also quieter. Like, a LOT quieter. And they text us when they finish which I thought was silly at first but in practice it means we get more loads done per day.
It's been 3 years and we've had to use the Lowes warranty once for a leak. Watching the repairman it seemed like a huge hassle to work on these new machines so I don't see these being fun to own once the 5 year maintenance plan expires.
We donated the old washer / dryer to a pet rescue group so hopefully they're still going.
My washer and dryer have the schematics for them inside the button console. I have only had to repair a faulty closed door sensor but it was very simple.
I recently replaced a knockoff Leatherman (which of course broke without being old) with a real one. It worked so well, I bought two. https://www.leatherman.com/ I first discovered these when I worked in the USAF in the 90's. They're not cheap, but one should support quality products with your hard earned cash.
I also needed to replace my belt recently. Discovered https://ansonbelt.com/. I'm not sure where they're manufactured, but they're quality belts with a unique self-measuring system and a latching mechanism.
I have Philips vacuum cleaner, I guess it's 30 years old. Some ducttape on the hose but still going strong. I bought a cordless one 2 years ago (also Philips, 8000 series), really love it, but it's starting to fail. I go back to the shop and the thing just works like normal, come back home... brush and leds fails periodically. So annoying.
I also own a lot of supossed 25.000 hours-of-life Leds, that failed after 1-2 years of incidental use. Also annoyes the sh** out of me.
LED's will last 25,000 hours. The drivers (the components that convert AC to the required DC, at a constant/steady rate) however, apparently die long before the actual LED does. I've replaced many so far. It's not hard if you can use a soldering iron (and the light in question supports it). If your LEDs are blinking, that's a sure-fire sign that the driver is bad (not the LED).
And, from my experience, it's probably the battery that's failing in your cordless vac.
When I was growing up, my mom got a Kirby vacuum. It was built like a tank, and seemed to hold up like one, too. When I was at college a few years later, I found a Kirby on a curb for the trash (landlord cleaned out an apartment). I took it, spent $100 on belts, bags, and attachments, and it's been with me for 15 years. When the pandemic hit, I finally bought more bags, and while I was at it, replaced the cord and light bulb. It very well might outlast me.
I had this issue in my house that was built six years ago. Lights going out all over the place that are supposed to have really long lives. When I finally replaced a few of them, it didn't seem to be the lights. The lazy ass subcontractors hired by the worthless builder installed a bunch of the wiring incorrectly. Every light I have replaced so far wasn't even grounded. Ground wire just flapping in the wind.
> I also own a lot of supossed 25.000 hours-of-life Leds, that failed after 1-2 years of incidental use. Also annoyes the sh* out of me.
Of all the compact florescent and LED bulbs I have bought, I has died because of a faulty component prematurely, and one has a whining driver. Other than that I failed to reach end of life of any of them. So, I never bought the second round because of that.
Oh, I killed a couple of CFLs because of heat, possibly.
Speaking of vacuums, I bought a $70 upright Bissell 10+ years ago now. It is one of my examples of "win some, lose some" in products, and how high prices don't mean quality or durability.
I've replaced the belt once. With the amount of hair I pulled out of the beater bar at the same time, I'm not sure the belt was the cause. Works as well as the day we brought it home.
I think there are a LOT of societal ills with sending too many people to College...who then get MBAs.
You're going to want to use what you earned, right? So you're gonna maximize profit and shareholder value.
Individually, none of them are particularly egregous. A little less sugar for your dollar, a sticky subscription on your credit card, A Washing machine that doesn't QUITE live as long as it should.
But in aggregate you end up with /gestures broadly at everything.
[+] [-] vages|3 years ago|reply
That being said, I definitely believe that planned obsolesence and unintentional bad quality is a plague on modern consumer items. I am lucky enough to have the time, knowledge, persistence and money to research and buy long lasting goods. For example, I have bought kitchen knives made out of a single piece of metal, which are therefore less prone to breaking than the run-off-the-mill ones. My jeans are from a Swedish jeans company that offer in-store repairs as long as it's practical. This is saving me money and effort in the long run. However, I do not believe in such individual solutions to what is essentially a systemic problem; people should expect good consumer items without researching beforehand like it was their hobby.
I'm glad that the EU is working hard on right-to-repair laws.
[+] [-] derbOac|3 years ago|reply
My biggest bugaboo in this area is with clothes. At some point I started being more careful, but found the published specs won't help because they don't actually tell you everything you need to know, or the company selling them is being defrauded themselves by manufacturers making things out of spec. In many cases too I'm convinced people have lost communal knowledge of what good items look like because theyve never seen them. So, say, they're happy with a sweater that is made out of very poor yarn that obviously won't last because it's warm and has a good zipper. We're at 2/3 now I guess.
However, even places like Consumer Reports will say they don't recommend an entire class of appliance, but then proceed to provide ratings, that are ostensibly good. How are those supposed to be interpreted? "None of these are worth buying but they are 95/100 in quality if you take that into account"? No wonder people are confused.
I've bought clothes from reputable vendors, with fabric from named mills to specs that should be quality, and found instead the cut was off spec and wouldn't fit. Or something about the fabric just didn't last anyway. It seems like it's always something, like I'm constantly being tricked in some new way once I figure out some other problem. It's such an enormous waste of money, time, and resources.
[+] [-] taylodl|3 years ago|reply
That TV didn't last 20 years - it was a huge hassle continually testing and replacing tubes.
Meanwhile I bought a 55" HDTV almost 20 years ago that's still running fine.
[+] [-] jtbayly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|3 years ago|reply
Planned obsolescence is a thing. So is building or making for the short term. There just wasn’t this great era where people made things for the long haul out of pride or something else. People always took the short term view when the market structure or incentives encouraged it.
[+] [-] theK|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattigames|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bambax|3 years ago|reply
This is a claim that was already present in Death of a Salesman. Here's the quote:
> I am always in a race with the junkyard! I just finished paying for the car and it's on its last legs. The refrigerator consumes belts like a goddam maniac. They time those things. They time them so when you finally paid for them, they're used up.
The play came out in... 1949.
It's not been my experience that everything is crap nowadays. But of course one needs to shop wisely.
[+] [-] sevensor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phaedrus|3 years ago|reply
They're noticeably sharper and truer than the ones you find now, more perfectly symmetrical in profile and grind, probably a half-dozen other subtle differences. When you drill a hole with one of these bits, all of the shavings are uniform and the sides of hole aren't ragged. There's less vibration, less heat, more progress.
[+] [-] gibspaulding|3 years ago|reply
When inheriting or estate sales aren't an option I've actually been buying a lot of used stuff off of eBay lately. PC's (the trick is to select "no OS included" to find the business ones IT departments are discarding), a label maker you could use as a bludgeon in a pinch, a vintage flannel that's actually wool.
I've come to really like second hand. Clothes don't shrink when you wash them, boots are already broken in, and things have generally survived past that first failure spike that weeds out the lemons.
[+] [-] wincy|3 years ago|reply
Instead, the failure state is that the fan that handles this broke with no warning. I lost a bunch of groceries, but luckily managed to figure out the issue and replace the part myself.
Then a few months ago I heard a clack clack like a fan was about to fail, so this time I replaced the fan after only about two days of no refrigerator.
I don’t understand how such an expensive device can have such a terrible failure mode that ruins basically everything inside my fridge, twice now (the freezer is fine though, it just gets colder).
Before this fridge my wife and I were totally broke and just had a $400 hand me down fridge that we literally never had any problems with. I don’t really know why modern stuff seems so bad.
I know I know, survivorship bias and whatnot, I don’t see all the broken refrigerators in the landfill, but even if that’s the case why not fire half your design engineers just trot out those old 1945 GE Ultracool (or whatever) designs and sell those?
[+] [-] crystaln|3 years ago|reply
Original PYREX was borosilicate glass which is extremely resistant to shattering due to temperature differences and therefore excellent for cooking.
The brand and reputation of quality was established. Time to profit. The brand was sold and gutted.
The material was replaced with cheaper soda lime glass, which if you google “exploding Pyrex” you will discover is dangerously far less resilient to temperature changes.
Presumably out of shame the brand changed to pyrex from PYREX except for lab glass which retains the capital letters.
[+] [-] kwhitefoot|3 years ago|reply
Generally still is in Europe. For instance this: https://bakerenogkokken.no/borddekking/serveringsskaler/pyre...
[+] [-] bingaling|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MarkusWandel|3 years ago|reply
Current car is at 202,000km and 11 years and essentially nothing has gone wrong with it except normal wear and tear replacement and it isn't even (in this road salt envioronment) noticeably rusty and it's never even had a spark plug out. Try that even 30 years ago.
On the other hand, motorized kitchen appliances really seem to be designed to be about 0.0001% better than the absolute minimum reliability requirement, lest a few extra pennies of manufacturing cost be wasted. That said, there are still gems. I have reason to hope that the current version of the Braun hand mixer is as good as my 20+ year one. I've had to open that up to resolder a transistor that had shaken loose due to vibration - design error; this heavy component should have been better anchored - but the mechanicals run as if it was new. One the other hand, the design of Braun food processors leaves me with little confidence in their long-term function.
When the delivery guys showed up with the fridge, 17 years ago, they said don't expect much, 10 years maybe. 17 years later the plastic parts on the outside are yellowed and cracked and the door seal is showing its age too, but it still works just fine. And I suspect chest freezers are still as good as they always were i.e. work for many decades (while consuming less power).
I'm not hopeful about the replacements for the washing machine (2000ish) and dishwasher (1987ish) when they wear out.
[+] [-] cfeduke|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nosianu|3 years ago|reply
> Recently, my wife needed a carrot peeler. She needed one rather quickly. Off to Target. The one she bought (the only one on sale)...
I stopped at the phrase "the only one on sale". Inevitably the next part reads:
> looked handsome enough, and the brand was one she recognized, but it failed in the useful department, miserably. It wasn’t sharp enough to peel a carrot.
Is this deliberate, or did the author not notice a core problem right there, in their own shopping behavior?
As for coffee grinders, I've got a Eureka Mignon and machines like that are expected to last a few decades easily, with a little bit of maintenance. If you buy the $99 stuff, well...
Especially in the kitchen some good stuff still exists. It's expensive, heavy - and lasts. Unfortunately you won't find those in many of the regular shops. In my city - Nuremberg, Germany - I only see that kind of (expensive) quality in a single specialized store (Kitchen Loesch, https://www.kuechen-loesch.de/). I myself was not aware of the kinds of good appliances that are still made until I went through the lower levels of that store for the first time. I too only knew the stuff most people know, which does not last long, visible at first glance already, with all the cheap plastics it's made of. Much of the better stuff is heavy and mostly made of metal. Even the hand blenders there almost all cost above 100 Euros, far more than I was used to seeing. On the other hand, those devices looked like they would last for a very long time, not like that shitty plastics Philipps model I own. Unfortunately it's not nearly the same to see pictures online, having the actual appliance right in front of you is very different as far as I can tell after that experience of actually seeing them there. The impression of solidity just does not transmit via some online shopping website picture.
[+] [-] walterlb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wonderwonder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikau|3 years ago|reply
All the fawning over the Niche Zero grinder does my head it - its using a crappy brushed DC motor and a plastic gearbox more akin to the quality of a $100 sunbeam conical burr grinder I had.
And like my Sunbeam grinder the gearbox will likely start to get very very noisy after 10 years of heavy use, not to mention needing new brushes at some stage which aren't user replaceable.
But hey, one youtube guy said some good things about the Niche so it must be the best!
[+] [-] blueblob|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tengwar2|3 years ago|reply
It's not relevant what the price was: that's a decision for the shop. If they can't sell carrot peelers at a price that makes sense for them, the answer is to not sell carrot peelers, not to sell things that are described as carrot peelers but which cannot peel a carrot.
[+] [-] crystaln|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logicallee|3 years ago|reply
I wonder, could the opposite reason account for all the companies selling crappy products? Could it be that all the companies that made the really high-quality products that last generations died out because they didn't have a sustainable business model?
It could be that creating a truly high-value product is expensive and selling one that never needs replacement isn't sustainable. Maybe after a while you run out of customers: the ones that are still happily using the product you specialized in making an expensive high-quality version of for life, just don't have a reason to buy another.
Thus perhaps the only companies that survive are the ones who have customers who keep rebuying after their products break.
How can customers help e.g. a refrigerator company survive, if they only buy one from them ever?
[+] [-] TrispusAttucks|3 years ago|reply
Cheap imitations of an artifact from a bygone era. Where playing with it too much or too hard will it break.
They're more of a display item than an actual appliance. Only meant for looking at and instilling the idea of a useful tool. But don't dare use it!
The reason is producers don't care if it works or not. The product is successful so long as they can trick enough people into buying it.
The mental, emotional, and financial exhaustion borders on psychological warfare from foreign advisories.
America needs to reboot it's manufacturing base with a focus on absolute best quality hands down, no excuses, survive nuclear winter American made products.
Let's break this wasteful Earth destroying, GHG creating cycle of madness!
[+] [-] theK|3 years ago|reply
No one? Was it just me then?
[+] [-] PopAlongKid|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carapace|3 years ago|reply
I got a wire cutter/stripper recently that gave me that exact feeling: "This isn't a real wire stripper, it's a non-functional replica."
(It's the kind that has a little adjustment screw/slider to set the diameter of the wire you're stripping. Only it's impossible to set the screw correctly because turning it to tighten it forces the slider to shift position. I wrestled with it for an hour and then ordered a different one. The handle plastic is weird too, it feels "icky" somehow. BTW, the new one, which works great, was the same price as the unusable one.)
The unusable one is not worth returning. And what are they going to do with it if I did return it? Throw it away? Sell it to someone else?
> And the world took the loss. A small one, but they add up.
Again, that's exactly how I feel about it. What a waste, to dig up the materials, forge them into this device, send it who knows how far back and forth over the Earth, just so I can throw it back into the Earth because it's not worth fixing it. It's fucking depressing.
I've got more anecdotes: a brand new soldering iron that doesn't solder; an aluminum folding beach chair that broke when unfolded for the first time; an air fryer with a custom grill that rusted in less than a year and can't be replaced; etc...
As far as I can see, you have to go out of your way to find the manufacturers and retailers that care about quality (and repeat business) and patronize them exclusively. Don't give any more money to the folks who are ripping you off. Instead, reward the folks who are doing the right thing. You're going to pay the overhead anyway either by doing your homework or by throwing away time and money and garbage items.
[+] [-] julianlam|3 years ago|reply
> I can’t say the same about my coffee grinders. I use the plural because I’ve owned a lot of them, all bought in their original packaging and dead within a year. They’re good ones, supposedly, with burrs not blades, but they stop performing before long, ending their long journeys from overseas factories in unmarked graves in my local Montana landfill.
A Baratza encore will last literally forever, and if it doesn't, you can replace everything in it.
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loganwedwards|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoosieree|3 years ago|reply
That said, I suspect that in another 70 years, Walter's juicer will still work, but you won't find any working examples of juicers from 2022.
It should be obvious to most people at this point that any appliance with the word "smart" in its marketing really means "smarter than you, sucker".
[+] [-] ddejohn|3 years ago|reply
I have no evidence to back my statements up, and I'm using extremely vague language, but this is at least my perception of this idea that "they don't make 'em like they used to."
[+] [-] assafweinberg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taldo|3 years ago|reply
Dull peeler? Sharpen it. Now you have a sharp peeler that can probably last 10 years with occasional attention.
Dead grinders? I'm sure at least one of them could've been fixed and extended its life significantly.
Sure, things are getting less and less repairable, but most still can be fixed of some common faults. It just takes a pinch of skill and a bunch of will.
[+] [-] jtbayly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cdelsolar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TrueGeek|3 years ago|reply
The new washer / dryer wash more clothes at once using less detergent and far less electricity. They're also quieter. Like, a LOT quieter. And they text us when they finish which I thought was silly at first but in practice it means we get more loads done per day.
It's been 3 years and we've had to use the Lowes warranty once for a leak. Watching the repairman it seemed like a huge hassle to work on these new machines so I don't see these being fun to own once the 5 year maintenance plan expires.
We donated the old washer / dryer to a pet rescue group so hopefully they're still going.
[+] [-] vageli|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmarreck|3 years ago|reply
Too bad all of our manufacturing went to China, a culture that has no concept of honesty. https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/in-china-honesty-is-not-th... https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/1879850/chinese-most-...
I recently replaced a knockoff Leatherman (which of course broke without being old) with a real one. It worked so well, I bought two. https://www.leatherman.com/ I first discovered these when I worked in the USAF in the 90's. They're not cheap, but one should support quality products with your hard earned cash.
I also needed to replace my belt recently. Discovered https://ansonbelt.com/. I'm not sure where they're manufactured, but they're quality belts with a unique self-measuring system and a latching mechanism.
[+] [-] teekert|3 years ago|reply
I also own a lot of supossed 25.000 hours-of-life Leds, that failed after 1-2 years of incidental use. Also annoyes the sh** out of me.
[+] [-] Jupe|3 years ago|reply
And, from my experience, it's probably the battery that's failing in your cordless vac.
[+] [-] theandrewbailey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonameiguess|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bayindirh|3 years ago|reply
Of all the compact florescent and LED bulbs I have bought, I has died because of a faulty component prematurely, and one has a whining driver. Other than that I failed to reach end of life of any of them. So, I never bought the second round because of that.
Oh, I killed a couple of CFLs because of heat, possibly.
[+] [-] doubled112|3 years ago|reply
I've replaced the belt once. With the amount of hair I pulled out of the beater bar at the same time, I'm not sure the belt was the cause. Works as well as the day we brought it home.
[+] [-] Damogran6|3 years ago|reply
You're going to want to use what you earned, right? So you're gonna maximize profit and shareholder value.
Individually, none of them are particularly egregous. A little less sugar for your dollar, a sticky subscription on your credit card, A Washing machine that doesn't QUITE live as long as it should.
But in aggregate you end up with /gestures broadly at everything.
[+] [-] inkcapmushroom|3 years ago|reply
Those MBA types have been cutting corners on quality for a while...
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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