Built to last
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Your parents washing machine also cost more because it was made better. The best price I could find for a standard washing machine in 1980 was $289. To put that into perspective, according to CPI inflation that is the equivalent of about $1,100 today. As a proportion of median individual income, that's like $1,550 today. You can still buy a Speed Queen washer for consumers that costs $1,500 and will last a long time, but people largely don't because the shitty one costs less than half of that.
You can also buy really good machines that last forever, you just have to pay a lot more. To me it seems the guy complaining just buys the cheapest washing machine build and delivered by slave workes from Amazon
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Not a repair tech, but this matches my experience maintaining and repairing my appliances. My early 80s whirlpool range and oven have had small issues here and there, but generally require swapping one part hidden behind some screws and will take under an hour. My Samsung dishwasher not only does a piss poor job, it also throws LC codes every few days. After the fourth time pulling it from the cabinet I had to put a series of shims to lift the leak sensor off the drip tray and buy a separate Wi-Fi moisture detector. My Samsung fridge (4yo) has a broken door ice dispenser and intermittently decides not to dispense water too. Old LG unit had a linear compressor that shit the bed three times before they refused to do any more warranty work on it.
Ya... The liner compressors on lgs were bad. They did resolve that issue though so it's not a problem anymore.
Man... Used to do a lot compresor 3-4 times a week.
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Your parents washing machine also cost more because it was made better. The best price I could find for a standard washing machine in 1980 was $289. To put that into perspective, according to CPI inflation that is the equivalent of about $1,100 today. As a proportion of median individual income, that's like $1,550 today. You can still buy a Speed Queen washer for consumers that costs $1,500 and will last a long time, but people largely don't because the shitty one costs less than half of that.
This the argument I have with clients on a daily basis, in regards to all kinds of manufactured goods. People are astoundingly awful at understanding and visualizing inflation and the value of a dollar over time, even people who are specifically educated on this point and even work with it as part of their jobs. Everyone has some threshold beyond which they absolutely won't countenance paying more than $X for Y, but this is always arbitrary and whenever the course of events drives the median price of whatever-it-is past that line they lose their minds.
Durable goods manufacturing is a race to the bottom because it has to be in order to overcome everyone's moronic preconceptions about what a product "ought" to cost. This isn't just a capitalist greed thing, although it's certainly that, too -- corners have to be cut, panels have to be made thinner, it has to contain more plastic and less metal, because otherwise it'll never be cheap enough for 99% of the population to agree to buy it and even then they'll all still bitch about how shoddily made it is. Year over year every manufacturer has to figure out how to make it cheaper to slide under MSRP. The manufacturers who take the opposite strategy inevitably wind up as niche players, because as much as people spout that they'd happily pay more for a better built thing, the flat out truth is they're all full of shit and to the nearest decimal point, none of them actually will if given the opportunity.
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the extreme vast majority of those are Samsung appliances.
Bro, fuck the Samsung fridge engineers that decided my ice machine doesn't need to actually be properly insulated and designed an ice box that's basically going to break and it's only a matter of time.
I have to keep reminding myself to defrost and clean it out. Last time it got so bad I couldn't even take the ice tray out without a ton of force. Then I melted the ice but derped and warped the little guide post thingy with heat. Had a tech come out and say it's unfixable, cool time flushing my money down the toilet ... After that I did what I should have done and just reheated it again and bent it and voila problem (I made) solved.
But seriously I hate that fridge with a passion. So much so I'm going out of my way to never buy Samsung again, their customer care is atrocious and quality is hit or miss. I have some Samsung appliances that have been bulletproof so far but I genuinely don't want to have to cross my fingers their QA didn't fail because trying to deal with their support for anything is a Kafkaesque hell.
Ya... I tell my clients that Samsung fridges aren't going to make ice. That's just the way they're made.
Samsung makes the worst fridge period. Their other appliances are fine. Very middle of the road. But their fridges suck ass.
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I want to start an appliance company that offers 10 year warranties with an additional 5 year replaceable parts availability promise. The designs will be simple, functionality simple with minimal quality of life improvements, and all repair manuals will be published on the website along with tutorial videos, while also banking on building a product that simply lasts longer.
I'm willing to bet that if that is what you advertise on, the longevity of the product at a minimal price, then the company should do fine.
You won't. You'll get annihilated by the next Chinese competitor who produces a piece of shit machine that breaks in 13 months like clockwork (and has a 12 month warranty), but sells for 1/2 or 2/3 of the price of your machine.
The average consumer is dogshit at conceptualizing the actual value of a product over its lifetime in proportion to its cost. They'll just see that the next machine on display at Best Buy or whatever looks modern and costs less to buy up front, and then they'll buy that one. When it breaks they'll bitch and moan on Facebook and Nextdoor and write ranty one star reviews everywhere, and then wheel right back to Best Buy and buy another machine just like it.
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Ya... I tell my clients that Samsung fridges aren't going to make ice. That's just the way they're made.
Samsung makes the worst fridge period. Their other appliances are fine. Very middle of the road. But their fridges suck ass.
Agree, I have other Samsung appliances and they're just fine. Just the fridge is a goddamn nightmare.
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But isn’t your sample biased because you’re a repair tech? People with working appliances don’t call you.
How often do you encounter, for example, a broken Miele washing machine?
We work on very very little Miele. So much so that I only encountered the brand a handful of times and have no recollection as to how those repairs went which usually means I didn't come back to do said repairs.
However, Miele has a very good reputation for reliability.
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Smeg
They make acceptable and pretty toasters and similar appliances, but avoid this brand like a plague for fridges
wrote last edited by [email protected]I have a 7-year old fridge from them, bought discounted at the appliance outlet because of damaged packaging, it's still like new and sips electricity. It's a basic model, brushed stainless, no displays or anything.
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I just had to get the fridge-freezer in my apartment replaced because the freezer started growing ice everywhere like that was its job, nothing I did helped. When the landlord came to take a look he was surprised by how old the one I had was, he looked it up and it's been here since 1993. I've lived here since 2016, and it worked perfectly until a couple of months ago. While the new fridge-freezer combo (one of those that's half fridge, half freezer on top of each other, same as the old one) is much better in many ways, it's obvious it won't survive for even 1/3rd of the time that the old one did. The one thing that annoys me is that my fridge magnets can't hold themselves up on the new doors because the metal is too thin, they just slide down to the bottom edges.
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We have a Miele we bought 13 years ago and which has far outlived the projected amount of washing cycles. I had to replace the water splitter, but apart from that it's still running fine. I heard that more recent Miele machines don't last as long, though.
Got a "entry point" Miele about 9 years ago. Same experience as you. If they have started compromising on quality I don't know where to go.. Asko is now Gorenje and produced in China, and have not pulled out of Russia.
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At least it's Wi-Fi connected.
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I suspect this is actually what's changed - labor is so expensive compared to the cost of the machine that people replace their appliance with a new one because it's only a little more than fixing their old one.
The guy on an assembly line who places a particular assembly in place and connects the tubes/bolts can perform that task on hundreds of machines in a day. The guy who has to drive to each person's house to replace the exact same part can do maybe 2 a day, assuming he has the right part on hand, and assuming that it's easy to diagnose which part has failed.
Sure, but I don't think the price balance was historically close to today. Appliances may have been, relatively speaking, a much bigger investment to the point where paying a repair technician for a service call was usually the better option. Today, not so much.
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Meh. Buy them second hand. Not even joking. As you said, good one last forever. while there's a bit of a logistics difficulty with second hand large appliances, you can also just rent a van for the day and ask a friend for help.
Problem is you don't know how well it was maintained /cared for by its former owner.
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Why are appliances shit nowadays
i bought a house with 20-30 year old appliances that work fine, but decided to start upgrading so I bought a new washer and dryer. The new machines dont work nearly as well and I know they're not going to last even 10 years. We're already having issues with them 4 months later. -
Your parents washing machine also cost more because it was made better. The best price I could find for a standard washing machine in 1980 was $289. To put that into perspective, according to CPI inflation that is the equivalent of about $1,100 today. As a proportion of median individual income, that's like $1,550 today. You can still buy a Speed Queen washer for consumers that costs $1,500 and will last a long time, but people largely don't because the shitty one costs less than half of that.
I spent a thousand dollars replacing the cheap compressor in my fridge because I asked the repair guy to replace it with better quality than it originally came with, and he used a commercial (as opposed to residential) grade compressor that was three times the price
But aside from a short lifetime, the big problem with cheap AC motors is they're imprecisely built and often waste more electricity as heat and noise than they put into their output shaft
Of course even with the better stuff there still "cot death" where a new product fails almost immediately (because noone tests their products), but at least those failures are under warranty, the cheap motors typically last at least a few years
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You won't. You'll get annihilated by the next Chinese competitor who produces a piece of shit machine that breaks in 13 months like clockwork (and has a 12 month warranty), but sells for 1/2 or 2/3 of the price of your machine.
The average consumer is dogshit at conceptualizing the actual value of a product over its lifetime in proportion to its cost. They'll just see that the next machine on display at Best Buy or whatever looks modern and costs less to buy up front, and then they'll buy that one. When it breaks they'll bitch and moan on Facebook and Nextdoor and write ranty one star reviews everywhere, and then wheel right back to Best Buy and buy another machine just like it.
At the end of the day these are commodity items. It's reasonable for consumers to buy whatever's cheapest from a reputable physical store and expect at least decent reliability.
The solution can't come from a manufacturer making a better product, because of the information asymmetry; the average consumer just can't be expected to spend hours researching every commodity item.
The solution has to be targeted legislative action with a clear goal of measurably improving the overall reliability of those commodities. Unfortunately lobbyists hate that because more reliability = less margin and fewer sales, and consumers don't often love it either because this kind of legislation directly translates to inflated prices (at least in the short term). There are still people bitching that you can't buy incandescent lightbulbs anymore... So regulators would rather play dead and hope nobody notices they are doing fuck-all.
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I want to start an appliance company that offers 10 year warranties with an additional 5 year replaceable parts availability promise. The designs will be simple, functionality simple with minimal quality of life improvements, and all repair manuals will be published on the website along with tutorial videos, while also banking on building a product that simply lasts longer.
I'm willing to bet that if that is what you advertise on, the longevity of the product at a minimal price, then the company should do fine.
Your product would be about three times the price of the cheap shit.
It might work in the current world with good advertising - Smarter Every Day (on YouTube) is part of a project to make a better, made in America, barbeque ~brush~ cleaner
There are a few companies now selling better quality stuff successfully, but I have seen no one doing so in whitegoods
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Everyone always talks about speed queens and I always have to chime in. The cost isn't worth it. As shitty and consumerist as it sounds, it has been far cheaper to replace every few years than buy a speed queen. For one SQ washer I could buy 3 of my Samsung washers, and for one SQ dryer I could buy 4 of my Samsung ones. I got both my washer and dryer used. The washer was bad within the first year and replaced with a near new referb and it has been good for 5 years. The dryer is still working After the 6 years I have had it. They cost me a fraction of the SQ price even with the extra washer purchase and still work. Even if they both broke every other year and got replaced, my 10 year cost is still less than buying a SQ. The price just isn't worth it.
I guess you assign no value to the waste of using 3 to 4 times the number of machines
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You can also buy really good machines that last forever, you just have to pay a lot more. To me it seems the guy complaining just buys the cheapest washing machine build and delivered by slave workes from Amazon
Problem is you can't trust anything. The fancy $2k machine might just be fancy in name. You don't know if stuff is good before it starts not being.
And reviews don't help, because they won't test a product for 5 years to check durability before posting -
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If it's a side-loading washer, you're not supposed to close the door all the way when it isn't in use. That's why it smelled.
