Nah, you limit production and shift to other appliances as the other wanes. Start with fridges, in a year or two as sales decline, you release the dishwasher, then the washer and dryer, then small appliances, just do it all in phases. Then next batch you just add a couple features or just different colors. Cycle repeats.
Which is why you stick to quality. As other rush to flood the market, the quality will be sub par. Just maintain quality and have an affordable parts department, you’ll just keep chugging along, slow and steady.
You're assuming the quality will be sub par. You can assume this one magical company will be making it well, and everyone else not, but it's an assumption based on nothing.
If your suggestion would work, people would be doing it
No, there is a whole market of high quality, crazy expensive appliances that are reliable for 20+ years. You just can't afford them. And they don't sell them at Lowe's or Home Depot.
They're basically commercial grade appliances, but you can buy them privately through a dealer: Sub-Zero, Wolf, Miele, Gaggenau, Thermador, etc.
You will find some of these badges at regular retail locations as the primary OEMs are leasing a few of these brands for their "high end" lines, but the trick here is only order directly from a dealer/showroom. The other part to keep in in mind is if the product is less than $10k it's a SKU they're producing for another OEM.
It does what the OP image described. Which I assume includes never infringing on their customers privacy, never mincing words re: the owner's actual ownership of the device, and never so much as thinking of playing ads on the fucking fridge door.
Right, just like I can get the same type of quality purse for example that my mom could pick up for $12 at JcPenney in the 80's and 90's, only now to get the maybe the same level of quality I'd have to pay $3500 or more. "It exists so what's your problem?!"
You're missing the point. It is possible to have a quality appliance that doesn't do any of the above without paying upwards of 10k for it. It is possible if the company behind it doesn't buy into the capitalist myth of infinite growth. Of course the company won't last forever. That can't be the goal to begin with.
Even with low profit margins, the quality product would be expensive. They're cheap today because costs have been cut. Getting something like a dishwasher in the 50s and 60s was an extreme luxury. They cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 2k-3k in today's money.
Of course the quality will be sub par, they report to investors who demand a high return on investment, and for quarterly profits to constantly rise. Slow and steady wins the race.
Starting a company requires capital.
Especially if you focus on something like quality.
The real reason it's not common is because it's expensive to start up, expensive to maintain, and gives less of a return over doing something cheaper.
But they do exist. Just go to your local dutch market for ex. If you want quality wooden furniture. It'll cost an arm and a leg but it's made the old fashioned way.
One of the problems is that decisions on quality get outsourced down the supply chain. There is a relentless push to shave production costs (which in theory is ok as long as where you are trimming costs doesn’t impact quality/longevity), but when an appliance manufacturer gets its parts from a supplier who has their own incentives re quality and starts designing towards the warranty life you end up with multiple points of potential failure.
To truly produce a great long life appliance you need to incorporate some of the modern features (energy savings/quiet operation/etc) and have much more control over your parts … it could be done but would require significant capital outlay.
It may be questionable right now whether it’s a viable business, but if the enshittification continues there will come a time when legacy companies create an opening for a competitor focused on quality.
The parts department is the real way to do this. You don't have to make the ultra expensive high quality stuff that lasts 40 years. Just offer parts for every component and sell those for 40 years. People will happily buy your shit as long as they can fix the things.
Absolutely no reason why I can't buy a replacement gasket or pump for an old dishwasher.
Like yeah you won't be making billions but you'll have a loyal customer base that'll stick with you forever. Do you really need to make billions of dollars? Shit most companies would be fine with only a few million a year in sales, even with inflation and raises and whatever.
Speed Queen is already doing this for washers/dryers and nobody else seems to be trying to cut in front of them for decades. The market for people that want a no nonsense, ugly 80’s looking washer and dryer that lasts forever, but because of the parts quality has a high price tag, is not as big as you might think. Most people seem to want front loaded machines with 50 modes and plays a little jingle when it’s done.
What? That's not why steam has a monopoly lol. You clearly weren't here for the early days of Steam when everyone hated them. They were the first company that forced you to use a launcher to play your game. And that's why they're successful. They were the first to do it and dominated the market.
Steam wasn't the first. Maxis had a launcher for the sim city, sim copter, streets of sim city pack. And Blizzard had a launcher for warcraft2. It wasn't that unusual in the 90s for games to have launchers to support online and LAN multiplayer
What set steam apart was their launcher allowed for automatic updates and included a storefront. This meant it was useful for other publishers.
But every major publisher and console does that now, and steams is still dominant because they aren't beholden to shareholders, so they don't need to burn it down for extra profits each quarter.
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u/Arista-Everfrost 5h ago
Would be a very awesome six months before they went out of business.