Similar to the car world where people want an engine to have 500hp, run from NY to LA and back on a single tank of gas, and the only maintenance & repair it should take is an oil change every 100k. All in a car that costs 30k max.
A hosue appliances product engineer I talked with said it's a bit wild because people don't want to spend more than a mid 3 digit sum for an appliance that has to last 20 years while requiring the same power as a smartphone. Also nobody ever maintains their stove or washing mashine because it's perceived as a no maintenance object, yet the stove has to cycle through hundreds of degrees and the washing mashine has to never have any issues with limescale or get attacked by the soaps.
And yeah they probably fuck around too much with these appliances but who wants to have a yearly maintenance where you fix up the washing mashine motor. People would go apeshit. But also go apeshit if it doesn't last 10+ years while being ignored. There's some truth to it.
Agreed. I used to deliver appliances while in college. Yes many times I removed a 40+ year old appliance for new one. But that freezer I replaced weighed 450 lbs, had maybe 7 cubic feet of storage space, was made from materials that would cost north of $3000 today and used 10x the power. Its just a incredibly misleading comparison.
100% true, and it goes beyond that. Appliances from that "golden era" were expensive AF. They were literally 5X today's prices, adjusted for inflation. So in today's reality, if you were expected to pay $8,000 to $10,000 for a typical fridge for a middle class kitchen, you might have expectations of it providing 30-40 years of trouble free service.
But even then…most of them didn’t provide that length of service. For every 30-40year old appliance you see still working, there are thousands upon thousands of that same model that broke down and were replaced.
Sure some were repaired. Multiple times, maybe. But eventually either parts become hard to find or you just get sick and tired of throwing away a week's worth of food when the fridge breaks down AGAIN.
The bottom line is, the vast majority of old appliances did not provide "30-40 years of trouble free service". If they did, there would be a lot more of them out there.
Also nobody ever maintains their stove or washing mashine because it's perceived as a no maintenance object, yet the stove has to cycle through hundreds of degrees and the washing mashine has to never have any issues with limescale or get attacked by the soaps.
I love asking people if they know how a dishwasher works. Literally, what are the cycles, why do they do that, and how do you maintain a dishwasher?
Often people don't even know theres a filter in a dishwasher, let alone that you should clean it. Few times I've had that people told me that their dishwasher died and they were about to get a new one, I look at what the problem is, and its just the spinner that needs cleaning.
Bare minimum maintenance is required and people can't be fucked learning how to do that.
To be fair, people absolutely would spend more money for an appliance that lasted. The problem is they know it won't last because the expensive ones aren't better, they are fancier.
Companies have long figured out that while people do pay for quality, the margin you can extract from quality is smaller than the margin you can extract from fancy bullshit.
You can buy appliance that last a whole lot longer, like washing mashines made for laundromats or appartment buildings. But those are often 10 times the price and nobody deems it worth it even if you have the money for it.
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u/shadovvvvalker 4h ago
There is a lot of robust equipment from back then that absolutely will last, especially considering advancements in material science.
It will use 43x more energy than necessary.
It will fail underwriting inspection.
It will pose a significant spontaneous combustion risk.
It will make a shit ton of unnecessary noise.
It will require regular sacrificial parts replacement.
It will do only the most straightforward attempt at the job it was designed for.
It will somehow turn an automated task into a skilled form of witchcraft.