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Wages have gone up and consumer goods have gone down in price and build quality. It's not feasible to have a repair business any more. Growing up, there were st

• toomuchtodo 9y ago
  > But what's the incentive for the manufacturers? They get to continue to sell their products. Internalizing externalities and all that jazz.
• pizzetta 9y ago
  Advertising, including Google, will feel the effect of a slower purchasing cycle. Fewer designers (in all industries) to design a lower volume of products. Less money to promote fewer items being sold. On the flipside, larger per-item transaction values. To add, It doesn't seem like we could go on indefinitely with ephemeral product cycles consuming increasing amounts of natural resources considering the increasing purchasing power of emerging economies.
  • whatshisface 9y ago
    A repair job still involves a purchase, but from a parts dealer or repair man.
    • pizzetta 9y ago
      This is true, but should still result in lower TCO. Lower TCO means lower velocity of money.
      • Silhouette 9y ago
        OK, but why should we consider the economic concept of money changing hands more rapidly to be an inherently good thing? There are both environmental and quality of life issues with the way our culture has evolved recently, particularly around advancing consumer technologies, which aren't (directly) financial in nature but are definitely things we could change for the better. Meanwhile, the increases in money moving around on paper are mostly in the direction of manufacturers taking advantage of consumers one way or another, and I don't have a problem with damaging that effect in favour of the others.
        • pizzetta 9y ago
          I think they have to be considered with respect to people's relative purchasing power. Ensure that if the velocity of money goes down that people's relative purchasing power remains equivalent. In other words, if making things more durable results in people working fewer hours, then we need to know whether that results in negative income repercussions for workers. A rudimentary example: 1x disposable widget took .5hrs to mfg. market price =$10 and lasts 1yr. CO = $10/yr 1x durable widget takes .6 hrs to mfg. market price =$50 and lasts 10 yrs. CO = $5/yr And you extrapolate that... So, yes, your costs go down over time, but so do your wages, so the deflation has to be measured so that earnings don't go down quicker than cost of living/cost of goods and services. Commensurate.
          • Silhouette 9y ago
            But this is make-work. It's a polite fiction, designed to support an economic framework that is looking less relevant as technology and automation play an increasing role in our industry. Our current economic system may even become obsolete within our lifetimes, hence the recent interest in alternative models like universal basic incomes. In terms of real productivity, a durable widget that has a 20% overhead to manufacture but lasts 10x as long is far more useful, and in terms of quality of life, people needing to spend fewer hours of their lives doing mundane work is a desirable goal in itself. In the long term, it seems likely that either people will find new ways to make a living, just as they did on countless past occasions when technology rendered a particular vocation obsolete, or we will move towards a different economic arrangement where people don't have to work full-time to earn a decent living, or quite possibly we will see some sort of hybrid with aspects of both newer types of work and reduced working hours.
  • undersuit 9y ago
    >Fewer designers (in all industries) to design a lower volume of products. The shrinking of the number of models and manufactures relative to the size of the market is already to blame for this. Maybe there would be more designers because now when you put out a product it needs to work for a long time, not until you can just tweak next years model?
• EGreg 9y ago
  Wait. Wages have gone up? Where and source?
  • toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Purchasing power has gone up for those who can take advantage of cheap goods, but as your question insinuates, wages have not gone up; they've been stagnant for decades.
    • EGreg 9y ago
      Purchasing power for many non-subsistence goods has gone up. Not so for rent, food etc. as far as I know. Purchasing power for subsistence goods would't go up due to the malthusian trap. The same way you have induced demand from wider roads to have more cars.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      • toomuchtodo 9y ago
        http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user230519/imageroot/2016/08/18/College%20Inflation.png http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user2305...
        • richardknop 9y ago
          It says housing inflation was around 50-60% but for example in London it has been 400% so this can be very dependent on where you live.
          • toomuchtodo 9y ago
            That graphic is US centric.
    • richardknop 9y ago
• pier25 9y ago
  I live in Mexico and here everything is repairable since wages are so low.
• patkai 9y ago
  If they changed to a service model they would have an incentive. If they leased a dishwasher 5€/month suddenly it wouldn't break for 15 years. Ten years ago I talked to a person in aerospace, he said they would change to a service model similar to jet engines, but since customers don't push them, they will wait it out.
  • freehunter 9y ago
    Anyone remember the unbreakable old AT&T landline phones? AT&T owned the phone, you just leased it from them, so they were completely indestructible. They weren't pretty, but they were bulletproof and you could slam the receiver down on a telemarketer without worrying about it getting damaged. So yeah, you're completely right. If people didn't own their own hardware, if it was owned by the company and leased, we'd likely see more incentive to make sure they lasted. Then again, companies discovered that you can lease something to someone and then charge them full price if/when they break it, so maybe not.
• bluGill 9y ago
  Repairability and longevity are not the same thing. Sure if you repair something it last longer by definition. However you can design something that is not repairable that still will last a long time. I once work on an embedded computer where we decided that the user would wear out one USB port before it would reach our longevity goals. We put two USB ports on it to get over that limit. The alternative was a maintenance schedule to replace the port. Either meat our longevity goals, but only one was also repairable.
• FTA 9y ago
  > But what's the incentive for the manufacturers? Possibly reducing the companies' environmental footprint on the world. Instead of cheap devices being scrapped every two years and sent to the landfill, consumers could instead hold on to the companies' products for much much longer. If products have comparatively more time and quality parts, the cost will indeed go up--both for manufacturing and retail price. My grandmother had the same bread mixer the whole time I was growing up. And I know she had it long before I was born. It was built to last and she took care of it. My mother, on the other hand, went through at least six different plastic, Made in China bread mixers over the course of my childhood. Where's the corporate responsibility for all the waste that is generated by crappy products? If you were KitchenAid or another brand, wouldn't you want to set yourself apart from the others as a company who cares about the environment by making products that will last for years to come and acknowledging that in advertising? Products that can also be repaired if there is an issue, as opposed to chucked aside for a new one because of their lack of value? I'd consider such a company the "Whole Foods" of appliances. Citizens who share similar conservation values will likely pay more for that product, just as those who opt for solar/wind energy over coal.
  • Brakenshire 9y ago
    This isn't really an incentive though, unless this is driven by very knowledgeable consumers the companies that don't do this will make more money and eventually drive out the moral companies. One way of doing it would be to charge companies up-front for the cost of handling the waste for the eventual disposal of the product. That directly disincetivizes companies from make it poorly, pile it high, sell it cheap business models.
    • politician 9y ago
      I'm becoming increasingly convinced that manufacturers should be responsible for the full cost of disposal, and that this obligation should be non-transferable to consumers. After all, they built the widget! The vast logistical network of freight, retailers, consumers, and waste disposal services merely transported the widget to a landfill. But there are difficulties with this viewpoint. How does the disposal obligation work in horizontally-integrated industries (e.g. car manufacturing)? How does it work with globalization (import taxes?)? Is there any viable way to account for the waste (core samples into landfills?) or will the cost be a guess subject to lobbyists? One approach might be to require the manufacturer or importer to rent space in a network of landfills by tonnage. Call it "waste disposal insurance". EDIT: A random idea would incorporate a blockchain containing transactions identifying the serial numbers of the products or components. That way, assemblages could be formally shown to be composed of properly insured components, even requiring the final serial number to be the hash of its components. The tokens could be traded between manufacturers and landfills directly, closing the loop on the product lifecycle. Compliance audits would simply compare sales records to the public chain. On the landfill side, tokens operate as space reservations by tonnage, and can be efficiently traded to balance loads without requiring products to be taken to specific landfills.
• Someone 9y ago
  If there was a clear incentive, the EU parliament probably wouldn't ask for one to be created ("Europe's Parliament called on the Commission, Member States and producers Tuesday to take measures to ensure consumers can enjoy durable, high-quality products that can be repaired and upgraded.") If followed up, this could end up the same as with lead-free soldering. There weren't good incentives for manufacturers to remove lead from soldering until the EU passed the RoHS directive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Substances_Directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Subst...) and, subsequently, laws were introduced to implement it throughout the EU.