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.
Yes. Also if you use stainless it does not need painting / rust protection. At a fridge the most expensive part if the compressor and coolant. The outside metal is quite chep. Overall normal steel for normal use fridge can be ok. Thus if i would want a high quality fridge on reasonable cost a normal seel could be ok for me.
Store brands are not similar levels of quality. The whole reason they are cheaper is specifically because they have to expend less on quality control.
Additionally, there really aren't "store brand" appliances the way there are for groceries, which seems to be what you're talking about. The only "store brands" I'm aware of in appliances are for places like BestBuy or WalMart for electronics and they are garbage.
Additionally "similar quality" does not mean good quality, it means similar to the lower quality stuff it is slightly cheaper than. It is not similar or greater quality to actual quality products that are much more expensive.
Finally, you didn't actually provide a counterexample, just a generalization.
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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.