3 ms·
The point of the story is back in the day, things were built to last a lifetime. These days, EVERYTHING you buy is disposable and not expected to last very long
by at-fates-hands 11y ago
The point of the story is back in the day, things were built to last a lifetime. These days, EVERYTHING you buy is disposable and not expected to last very long.
- sageikosa 11y agoPretty much that. The toaster looks retro, but only because it was built before that type of product hit commodity market saturation and manufacturers realized that cheap meant both better sales (and margins) and a built-in time lagged replacement market. The toaster-oven, with its newer features, had not the staying power.
- jimmaswell 11y agoI've read that this is more due to increased complexity and smaller parts. Maybe it's both that as well as companies wanting to make money off repairs/replacements as implied.
- sageikosa 11y agoI am not sure that toasting technology has gotten orders of magnitude "better". Energy in toast out. I also don't think it was necessarily a conscious decision to make disposable toasters (or cell-phones or effectively computers), just that a market segment opened up and overtook others. We might blame consumers, but we can only blame them in aggregate for incenting a trend to continue by buying into it.