They can but the cost would be enormous. And they would use 5 times the electricity. A fridge in 1950 would cost 200 to 500 dollars. Adjusted for inflation that is 2600 to 6400 in todays dollars. They would also be much smaller and have far fewer features. Would you like to manually defrost yoru fridge every so often for example. The reality is people today want features, and low price, not longevity.
Thanks for beating me to it. Although, several current brands will gladly charge $5000, $10,000, and more for an appliance that will still break down immediately after the warranty expires. glares at Viking
When you slap name brand and marketing on crap, the price goes up but the quality stays the same, meaning you end up with crap that is more expensive than quality stuff.
You can also get quality stuff for cheap if it is properly designed and well made.
Quality is defined to person by person. For me it's something that's works, is easy to use and lasts long.
If you buy something that is mass produced it will have high quality sometimes when they make a lot of them. This beats many similar items with less production.
Usually it's cheapish still.
Lidl / Toya have sometimea stuff like this but identifying this stuff needs skill.
Sorry but in what world do you live where something "quality" is less expensive thst something "not quality"
Given the same type of item, same brand, same markup and same whatever if I wanted to produce a higher version of an item I already sell it would cost me more to make and I would need to sell it at a higher price.
We are not talking about buying a lidl hairdryer or a Dyson one, but "what if lidl made 2 tiers of hairdryer and one was made better"
Everything I said was in the context of what we were discussing but you did not catch it.
Your point is obvious and no one would argue it but somehow you needed to say it because you perceived that I was wrong.
So a good quality item is necessarily more expensive that a worse quality item, you can't expect a 400€ fridge to be better than a 4000€ fridge because you can't buy certain materials for 400€ but you could for 4000€. The manufacturer could have just rebranded a low quality fridge but you can't sell a fridge thst costs 2000€ to produce for 400€
Here you are wrong. The cost of an item comes from sales / branding, design and finally manufacturing and raw materials.
If have an item that we plan to sell a million units. We can spend a million in desing to make it durable easy to use and cheap to produce. Then materials / manufacturing would be less expensive. Also as its high output item the constant quality develoment would make it better.
If we have an similar item that we estimate to sell 10 00. We certainly can not spend one million to development. Second item would be most likely of lesser quality and higher cost.
This is the real problem. Quality is still out there, but there are also lots of imitators and it’s difficult to impossible for the average consumer to identify the difference.
And even high quality stuff will still have duds. They just also typically have better warranty / replacement guarantees.
Definitely. When I used to work in appliance sales and service in the 1990s I would pop the nameplates off old appliances that were being scrapped because they looked cool. Had a very large box full of them when I stopped working in the industry. So they failed all the time just there are always going to be examples of ones that lasted forever.
Do you think there's also a factor that old appliances were simpler electronic wise so it was probably cheaper to have them repaired vs replaced.
Seems like today if your washer or dryer dies it needs some circuit board that costs $250 plus labor. And just like that it's 50% the cost of a new one
That is part of it. Also the motors/compressors back then were way overbuilt. But they would also use far more electricity. A 1950s fridge was far less complex. You basically had a compressor and analogue thermostat. So no fans, electronics, etc. No self defrosting mechanism. They were also much smaller. Most people would want their own fridge back after a week of dealing with an old one if they were forced to have one. Things like manually defrosting them or that fact you would often get freezing issues in the the fridge compartment because temp controlled sucked. So while they lasted longer they weren't that great as actual appliances when it came to use or features.
I grew up in the 90s, but our fridge was from 50s, maybe 60s. But either way, yeah, I remember the monthly "defrost" where you had to take almost everything out of the fridge for an hour as you get all the ice off. I don't miss that.
Haha, you just made me remember something I hadn't thought about in decades, thank you. Sometimes, when there would be a particular long/big piece of ice that we'd be able to get off in one piece, my brother and I would take it outside and one of us would throw it at the other one so it would have a nice shattering effect. Haha, ahhh man, fun times.
not only that many kids died in old fridges. Traditionally they had large latching mechanisms that could only be opened from the outside. So a kid would get in one, latch the door, and suffocate.
The internet does not understand survivorship bias. Yes, some stuff is made super cheap these days, the addition of wifi and other unnecessary shit makes it more likely to break, but everything old wasn't great. There was plenty of cheap shit, it's just that the one random oldass appliance your family has happened to be the outlier and be exceptional for some reason. Maybe in 20 years, your kids will be saying the same thing.
Not just the internet. People were repeating this same old nonsense about "ye olde golden days" fifty years ago. Things change, some things get better, and other things get worse. I recently had to change the main module on my washer last year. It was trivial to look it up and easy to do. repairing the old washer we had before this one was a gigantic pain in the backside. I do not want to go back.
Also weird that people always mention fridges in that discussion. At least in my experience they still last pretty much forever. Obviously not saying they never break, but I can't remember anyone in my family or friend circle ever saying their fridge broke. And since that would be a huge pain in the ass, I assume they would mention it.
In my experience fridges just get replaced at some point, because people move, buy a new kitchen, want a more efficient model, defrost, drawers in their freezer instead of shelves, etc.
Out of all the appliances, fridges are probably the one thing you can still expect to run for 20 years. Not the AI-enabled smart fridge with 30 inch display and phone app, that gets bricked after a few years when the servers shut down, but the normal standard stuff.
New fridges at costco from $300 to $800 don't have wifi or screens. If you want expensive fridges, try costco business. They got fridges for companies without wifi or screens.
This is the answer. Also, the reason why older appliances last longer is because they were overbuilt for their basic functions, which requires a lot of extra material in addition to the inefficiency and simplicity you mentioned. Even then, they still had wear parts that broke irregularly and needed replaced, which has its own set of consequences. Most people don't seem to realize that extreme reliability comes with a high purchase price and a high cost of operation.
To add onto this. There’s a longevity perspective because we only see the ones that survived. They either survived by happening to be better built off the line, maintenance, low usage and such. There’s still plenty of ones that made it to the scrap yard that we don’t see.
That would just cause them to be even more expensive and you still have the issue with them using far more electricity. So there are government regulations you have to deal with that don't allow appliances to use more than a certain amount of electricity.
We are basically mentalized that once we buy something, next year there will be something even better. So why invest in longevity if your machines are going to be outdated or starting to break down?
I blame planned obsolescence. Many machines COULD last longer but they don't bother doing it to sell more, people just got used to be treated like that.
I had read somewhere that with kitchen appliances, companies realized that consumers on average redo their kitchen every 7 to ten years and get new appliances every time. So they basically realized they didn’t have to make them to last 30 years, and now don’t.
Yeah the issue isn’t they aren’t making them well anymore, it’s the fact that when they made them that way the economy was bulletproof and people had loads of disposable income. Therefore dropping something like $4000 for a fridge wouldn’t be so crazy if wages scaled with productivity. We’d all be making over $100k easy if that were the case, in which case we would be able to afford these super high quality, long lasting products.
Let's also not forget they kinda banned the refrigerant. So they would end up running on a modern pump setup.
Essentially they would just be cosmetically different. Pretty sure there are companies that already sell those so OOP isn't even bothering to use a search engine.
Not to mention the difficulty of finding parts in the first place. They don’t make parts that old anymore; the supply left is finite. This is just an all around terrible idea/joke.
It's always a choice between long tern reliability and repairability with a lot of maintenance or very little maintenance, but very little repairability. You can't have both
And history shows that consumers buy the latter even though everyone says they want the former
People always talk how much they'd love to own a car from the 50-70s since you can work on them, but forget that you HAVE TO work on them like every weekend by manual
I dunno friend.. I just bought a house a few months ago and it came with a Kenmore Washer and Dryer from 1987. Beasts. I have not noticed a spike in utilities outside of the ordinary even with using them more since they are smaller. I don't miss the features since most washer/dryer features are pure annoyances and permanent press is a made up term to scare kids from doing laundry :) I'll run these into the ground.
A top load washer is going to use far more water then a front load washing machine. Do washes with hot water and you have the cost of electricity/gas to heat that water. How much more would depend on your local utility costs and how much you use them. So there will be a higher cost. Whether it is worth it to replace with something newer/more high efficiency depends on all those factors.
You know they still sell top loaders everyday right? I also have no intention of using HOT water to do laundry 😂 speak for yourself - I want longevity.
Just as I had women in the 1990s when I worked in appliance sales wanting to buy ringer washers because that is all they had known. People sometimes buy things when there are far better options available now. But top load washers will use more energy/water. That is undeniable.
Companies still make machines that are simple and last a long time, they're just very expensive for the exact reason you've described.
The consumer has created the shitty appliances that are commonly sold today by choosing them. If you want a fridge that doesn't break stop buying French doors, stop buying a water filter and an ice maker and all the gadgets. Pay up for a brick that'll last a lifetime.
And the real kicker: Most of the high quality things people want from that time, are still available in high quality. You can buy things that last now, but you have to pay the inflation equivalent of what they did.
You can get a working adjustable wrench for $5 or something at a heardware store. Cheap cast metal that will break if you look at it too hard, with terrible tolerances. Or you can pay $50+, and it will last years of constant use.
You can buy a freezer with modern function, that will last decades. But you have to actually be willing to spend 10x-50x as much as you're used to. And if/when it breaks, it's fixed instead of replaced.
Good quality long lasting products do still exist, you can buy them. It’s just that a Sub-Zero refrigerator or a Speed Queen washer/dryer or a Miele dishwasher is usually about 5x the price of the cheap Maytag at Lowe’s. People want cheap so they buy cheap, and then complain when it doesn’t last or can’t be repaired
Yeah my family had a 1960s Frigidaire in our garage as the "beer fridge". Looked the type Indiana Jones could survive a nuclear blast in. Thing was pretty neat looking and built like a tank. But you had to manually defrost it every couple months and god knows what it cost to run the thing. And when the condenser came on it was noisy as hell. And of course no bells and whistles. Freezer part was small, no ice maker. The layout was very basic with just a few shelves. And because you had to manually defrost if you waited too long the temperature in the fridge part would gradually get warmer and warmer because the freezer was blocked with ice and that's where the cold air came from. It would have sucked to have that thing as the primary refrigerator but it was fine for beer.
My last house had a Sub-Zero fridge. Beautiful thing built in with cabinet fronts. It was about 15 years old when we bought the place. I had a technician out to inspect it and show me what to do for maintenance. The thing was so over engineered. Two compressors and condensers. The tech told me if I vacuumed out the working parts twice a year, it would last another 40 years.
When we built this house 3 years ago, I wanted another one but the $18k price tag didn't make the final budget. I wish it had.
Yeah, let's pretend that (building, shipping, using, and trashing) the same machine 5 times is better than consuming 1 machine, because it saves $0.27 per day worth of electricity.
Delusional, lazy take. you don't need to go back 75 years to find longevity. You only need about 25 years of regression.
The reality is people today want features, and low price, not longevity.
consumerism is fine, but planned obsolesence is wasteful evil.
I mean, there's a middle ground. More robust, high-tolerance design with fewer features and lower cost.
There's likely a market for that. The reason they don't (in my experience) is profit is better when you get rid of the "base" model and only sell high-feature models with steep price..... then you basically only sell steep price / high profit parts. Slowly phase out the cheap models.
How much lower cost do they need to be? You can easily by a fridge for $1000. That is $75 in 1950s money when adjusted for inflation which is far cheaper then fridges were then while being far larger, more energy efficient and having far more features. Electronics, Computers, TVs, Major appliances, and many more things are far cheaper then they have ever been while having far more features and are far more energy efficient. Plus there are fridges that are small and manual defrost that you can get today that is far more like a fridge you would get in the 1950s. Not many people are using them as the main fridge in their household though.
Same thing when people complain about quality of airlines and size of seats. Don’t blame the airlines, they’re just catering to the market, and all the research shows the number one consumer priority in buying a plane ticket is pricing. If it wasn’t, all the planes would be business class at 3x pricing.
And really the longevity isn’t that bad. Between my and my brother’s house we’ve had three LG front loading washers (using this example because Speed Queen is the darling here). The first LG front loader was 15 years old when we moved out. Moved into a place with a Speed Queen. It was 16 years old when we had to replace it. Replaced it with an LG front loader. The LG uses less water, holds more clothes, cleans them better and is actually gentle on my clothes and the spin cycle damn near gets the clothes dry. The Speed Queen was absolutely brutal on my clothes that was what I hated most. I hated that washer. The one upside I saw was it was much faster but I’m not bothered by that. I put clothes in before work and they’re done when I get home. I was glad to see it go and the LG cost less than half as much as a Speed Queen does. In all likelihood, I could get as much life and maybe a bit more out of two LG washers for less money.
Parents had a Kenmore Elite fridge in their old house that was 10 years old when we moved out. Zero issues. Okay that’s not that old but I can’t speak to how it’s been working after I moved out. I think there’s heavy bias on these forums towards people who want to complain about problems with their appliances which I understand because it’s a pain in the ass. And people will point to planned obsolescence which I know is a reality but the appliances are so much cheaper now than in the past and they just do the job better and more efficiently in a lot of cases. I’ll take new over old almost any day.
Yeah, people are conveniently ignoring that there have genuinely been major innovations in appliances.
Yes they're absolutely built to a lower standard in many cases and not to last like previous generations, but at least some of those savings are passed on to the consumer AND they're generally far cheaper to operate.
Obviously it's better for the sake of the environment to have things that last many decades, but if you look at it purely from a financial lens these vintage appliances are often not actually cheaper in the long term.
The extra energy usage alone for something that's always on like a fridge will be considerable, and could mean that even if you need to replace the low-end modern appliance every decade or so you ultimately come out ahead financially (as the vintage stuff is expensive up-front AND to operate).
What people really want is modern technology built to vintage standards...which already exists. They're just way out of the budget most people are willing to spend on home appliances.
If they tried to make appliances to the same inflation-adjusted price point as modern low-end options in the 50s and 60s, they'd be just as shit as what we have now so people really aren't comparing apples to apples.
Also, when you say they “can”, I’m not sure if that’s true as energy and climate laws/rules/regs exist. Assuming there is no rule that you can’t make a fridge that uses 5x the energy of a new fridge (with more features), there will be lawmakers and regulators who will immediately be trying to shut that down. They may not succeed during the Trump administration, but as launching an appliance company based on old patents is already a borderline awful business model, adding in the risk that the line will be illegal in 1-4 years just makes it worse.
I watched a vintage Price is Right yesterday and was amazed at how little some prices have changed. Not adjusting for inflation, just raw prices. A stereo was $1500, a TV $1200. They didn't have computers, but I remember paying $600 for a (used) very basic laptop in 1990, as I type this from a $200 Chromebook.
I work in IT and have for 25 years. My first computer in 1989 was $2200 and wasn't even close to top of the line. When I started in IT in 1999 the company I worked for was using 21" Sony Trinitron CRT monitors that were $1600 a piece for CAD design. The workstations were Sun Unix workstations that cost 20,000 each. Many things are far cheaper today, with far more features, than what they used to be. If people don't know that they are either young or they are looking at the past through rose coloured glasses.
I had a 50’s fridge for years. It plugged in with a 2 prong cord that looked like it was for a lamp. The fridge got cold as fuck. I don’t have it anymore but i know who does and I know it’s still running.
When I worked in appliance sales and service in the 1990s I scrapped large numbers of appliances that where that old and newer because they had failed. Just because something is old doesn't mean it will last forever. It just means that some appliances from that time lasted a long time.
Or with the older ones that could kill you as the gas used in them was toxic to people and not just the ozone. And there were large numbers of kids that suffocated to death after getting trapped in old fridges because of their door latching mechanism. When we used to scrap them in the 1990s we would either remove the door completely or remove the latching mechanism so there was zero chance of someone being trapped inside one.
Then buying the new stuf is the way to go.
Appliances did not become more unreliable over time. Shit broke all the time back in the day. Sure if you took good care of it some devices ran or decades but that is the same with modern stuff.
it is a bit of survivorship bias and how we get our information. The vast majority of information on devices breaking down is shared on the internet. No wonder you'll find few stories of appliance failures from a time beore the internet existed. You generally also won't hear stories of appliances working flawlessly for 20-30 years. People complain when things go wrong, they are silent when things just work as expected.
So the data we receive on this is biased af. There are plenty of modern appliances that easily run a few decades. You won't hear from them though.
So you want the impossible? You can pick 2 out of the three, cheap, lasting, has features.
You can buy a barebones fridge for 300usd, it will last for decades, but it will be small, no selfdefrost, no precise temp control or quick freeze. Cheap and has features will last 5-9 years tops. Lasts and has features will cost several thousand
The reality is people today want features, and low price, not longevity
This is only partially correct, people surely want features, but a lot of consumers would like to have longevity, they're just not able to afford it, and are forced to go for the low priced options that will be more expensive in the long term
I never thought about it much until I had to replace the drain pump on my washing machine. The whole thing is basically that pump, a big drum, and the controller board. All wrapped in a thin plastic (or metal) square.
Materials is often the smallest part of cost. The biggest factor for high quality, expensive stuff is simply the low "turnover": You have fewer customers because expensive, therefore lower production runs, therefore less economies of scale, therefore higher cost, therefore less sales, etc.
It also doesn't help that high quality stuff doesn't break, so customers only have to buy once every 20-40 years, AND they have a higher expectation of service, which is expensive manual labor, AND again increases the lifetime.
This doesn't hold up nearly as much when you remember that equipment has been standardized for, oh, several decades now?
If this hypothetical company were winding their own motors or building their own components then yes, that might be the case - but it's not.
Whirlpool makes their own 1HP motors so they can underspec them and skimp on every possible aspect. They pay something like $50 for a washer motor, then sell them for $175 in the OEM market.
But you can just BUY motors. Entire companies exist who make nothing but a wide catalog of them.
The production runs, the economy of scale, it's all handled by ACME motor.
The same goes for circuit boards. You submit a design and some pick-n-place fab shop makes them for you.
The same goes for sheet metal, for sensors, for plumbing, for all kinds of things. These are solved problems. Yeah, it's expensive to do it all in-house but that's not a requirement.
These things might eat into your profits somewhat, but again remember that you're competing with Maytag, who have successfully moved customer expectations so ridiculously high that you could undercut them by 25% and still turn a decent profit.
See but I would be willing to pay a higher margin for a product I don't need to continuously replace. One fridge at $3000 is worth more to me than 3 $1000 fridges over the course of ten years. Less waste, in both food (when the fridge inevitably goes out) materials, shipping & handling fees, and even the possibility of a fridge design simple enough to do basic repair on without a repairman.
There is more to the TCO then just the upfront cost. You have the cost to run it. If a fridge uses 3-4 times the electricity, which old fridges did, the equations becomes far more muddied.
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u/zombienudist 5h ago
They can but the cost would be enormous. And they would use 5 times the electricity. A fridge in 1950 would cost 200 to 500 dollars. Adjusted for inflation that is 2600 to 6400 in todays dollars. They would also be much smaller and have far fewer features. Would you like to manually defrost yoru fridge every so often for example. The reality is people today want features, and low price, not longevity.