10 ms·

Yes but refrigerators back then were around $2-3000 in modern currency (for a no frills ice box). You can get a cheap fridge now for like $90 (mini fridge). Muc

by chomp 7y ago

Yes but refrigerators back then were around $2-3000 in modern currency (for a no frills ice box). You can get a cheap fridge now for like $90 (mini fridge). Much of our modern lifestyle was created by accessibility of home appliances like washing machines, refrigerators, and air conditioners, and that accessibility was driven by companies making things cheaper (but easier to break). You’re free to buy appliances like the stuff that used to exist. They are found in the commercial realm, and you’ll still be spending about $3000 for a no-frills entry level fridge.

mauvehaus 7y ago
I looked into commercial ranges, not because I actually intend to purchase one, but because I'd gotten spoiled cooking on one and got curious if it was even feasible to get one. For those of you who haven't cooked on one, one huge perk is that you can get a low simmer with the heat spread fully across the bottom of the pan, not just in the center. It turns out, however, that the standard depth for a commercial cooktop is quite a bit larger than the standard depth for a domestic one. Having worked (briefly, a long time ago) at a chain bakery, I vaguely recall the fridge being a very different size than a domestic one. Sure, you're free to get commercial gear, but you aren't just paying more for the appliances: you're going to be paying to renovate your kitchen to fit them.
- nkozyra 7y ago
  Completely ignorant on this, but ... how does this differ from a decent home-grade gas range? Does it not depend heavily on the cooking vessel?
  - S_A_P 7y ago
    Commercial ranges get hot. Fast. In a big surface area. My father in law was a higher up at a major food company that sounds like a major network equipment manufacturer. He put a commercial kitchen in our barn. It has roughly double the width and 30% deeper than a consumer cooktop. It has 6 eyes and will bring 3 gallons of water to a boil in less than 10 minutes. Preparing a meal in it cooks in a matter of minutes. We use16-20” skillets on it and there is no issue with hot spots. I don’t have the numbers but I wouldn’t doubt if it had triple the btus of even the best home model. The oven is gas and convection and cooks about 30% faster than a standard electric oven. The whole experience is just faster and larger scale. If you have the room and a father in law to pay for it I highly recommend buying one!
    - nkozyra 7y ago
      Mind sending me your wife's phone #? ;)
    - S_A_P 7y ago
      Looked up the model we have it it is a 30,000 BTU cooktop. Looks like the high end “home” cook tops will top out at 18000 btu. I bet the average home cook top is 10-15,000 btu. So I was a bit off, but it is definitely a much hotter stove. It is a very effective heater for the house as well so keep that in mind if you want to go “pro”.
- aeyes 7y ago
  We have some industrial washing machines and dryers and they each break down at least once a year. But so far it has always been easily fixable. Can't say the same thing about modern home appliances.
- jakeogh 7y ago
  Try induction. It's like swimming in a salt water pool...
secabeen 7y ago
The other interesting question to consider is: how long do consumers want to run the same fridge? How likely is the fridge to be damaged in some other way that causes the extra life of the 50-year fan to be wasted away in a refuse dump or recycling center? There's a balancing act to do, between too short a lifetime, wherein the customer is not ready to replace the fridge yet when it dies, and too long a lifetime, where resources are spent to make something last a long time, and it gets thrown away anyways. The original video didn't estimate a lifetime for that motor, but I would expect about 15 years is a standard lifetime for that motor, and that about fits with people wanting to replace their fridge at about every 15 years. Sure, some will go to 20 years, and others will fail at 10, but putting a 50 year motor in a fridge is a form of waste. (There's also the angle of increasing efficiency, that also pushes towards a more frequent replacement cycle than 50+ years)
- DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
  Considering that fridges today have built-in 24” touchscreen displays running Android and cavity cameras so you can see inside your fridge when you’re at the supermarket - the useful life of a fridge is probably on the order of 1-2 years before Google obsoletes the firmware and Samsung shuts-down the video feed relay service.
  - nkozyra 7y ago
    I've messed with these in stores and just been blown away at what a useless feature this is. Ah, yes, an appliance running Android Cupcake what a fabulous idea. It's clear that some items have hit peak functionality and manufacturers are just bolting on nonsense to keep up the facade of "luxury." But I'm sorry, running Spotify on my fridge is hokey, gauche and entirely unnecessary.
    - eclipxe 7y ago
      That’s the point.
      - 7y ago
Spooky23 7y ago
That’s what you assume, but entry commercial appliances are garbage just as much as consumer devices. Your best bet is to look for used stuff older than circa-2005. That’s when the efficiency standards increased and manufacturers started undersizing motors in earnest and using all electronic controls that fail. This is especially relevant for refrigerators and washing machines. Our current washing machine is a speed queen laundromat model (sans cash box) that was manufactured in 1988 and that I pulled out of the garbage in 2006 for $0, and put a new clutch in for about $50. There is literally not a better machine made on the market, and the efficiency claims made by modern devices are both questionably accurate and overtaken by the expected lifespan of 5-7 years.
- fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
  Yeah, our house came with a Viking commercial cabinet depth refrigerator, and it has been warming up on us semi-regularly for no apparent reason and, after a bit of research, I discovered that this isn’t all that that uncommon for these units.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - xxpor 7y ago
    Is it running a de-icing cycle?
    - fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
      I don't think so: I didn't touch anything and it just starts beeping its "high temparature" warning.
- chomp 7y ago
  I completely agree, and a major growth segment of electronics and appliances has been “pro-sumer” style devices. These are basically the same as their regular consumer devices but either more commercial features and management, or easier support and repair, or is just marketing glitz. It’s very easy to get fooled in this segment and think you are getting quality when you actually aren’t. +1 for Speed Queen. I hear the newer ones aren’t the same but still way better than the same ol’ white labelled electrolux appliances that are rebadged to every brand on the market.
mindslight 7y ago
Converting the cost into "modern currency" is missing the larger problem though. As companies are making things cheaper to produce, the overt government policy is to debase the currency so that nominal prices go up instead. Wages nominally rise too, but not nearly as much. So we get left with cheaply made appliances that actually aren't cheap, while the savings get funneled upwards.
lb1lf 7y ago
I'll recycle a comment I made in another thread a year ago: When clearing out my grandmother's house a few years ago, my uncle and I almost broke our backs trying to get the freezer out. It felt like it weighed a ton, even empty. My grandmother told us it had been a wedding present, and that they had been totally awestruck at the time at the generous present from her parents-in-law. After all, a decent freezer cost at least 2,000 kroner! (At this time, the average yearly gross pay was just in excess of 7,000 kroner.) My grandparents married in 1950. Since then, monetary value has been reduced twenty-fold. You can still buy a top-loading freezer for 2,000 kroner; I just checked. So - in 1950, you had to work for five months to earn money for a freezer (after taxes.) In 2017, I have to work one day for a freezer (after taxes.)
Tepix 7y ago
It takes fractions of a penny to make something with electronics last several years longer than just the minimum 2-5 years. Yet the device manufacturer chooses the short-lived version. Consumers should demand devices that have a long life and can be easily repaired ideally by yourself. As long as there are rapid technological advances, consumers do not care about the lack of longevity and the resulting waste. Our parents had long-lasting household appliances, radios and TVs that could be repaired. It was considered standard to receive a circuit diagram with your device.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  It costs more BOM money now and manufacturers will sell fewer of them in the future. And so they don’t choose that path...
throwawaycanada 7y ago
>You’re free to buy appliances like the stuff that used to exist. They are found in the commercial realm, and you’ll still be spending about $3000 for a no-frills entry level fridge. You can certainly pay that. And they are better than residential. But they are not like old residential. Often these "made to fail" products actually cost more to engineer than products that last longer. It's just the company makes more money by selling you two of something than one of something.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  Something to also be aware of is that some commercial "appliances" should never be installed in a "residential" (or anything close to it) setting. I once had an employer who had this extreme Icee addiction. Our office was near a 7-11, and he'd be over there getting an Icee all the time. Well - one day he was one Craigslist, and found an Icee machine someone was selling for a few hundred dollars. Since I was the only one with a pickup truck, he enlisted me and all the other software developers to go and pick up this machine - he was going to install it in the office. Yeah - he made terrible decisions like that - apparently paying us to do manual labor at software development rates was a-ok. So we go and get this machine - heaviest darn thing I've ever seen, short of the cast iron fire place insert my parents had. We get it wrestled into my pickup, and drive it back to the office. We carefully get it up to the office. Then began the long process of making it functional. He dragged me all over the place, I'm not sure why I was the picked guy. But we went to ace hardware, various welding supply places (needed CO2), and several other places - to get all the special hoses and other parts to fix the darn thing. Some parts we could only get from Icee itself - fortunately there was a local distributor - and I don't know how he swung it, but he managed to not only get parts, but also to get Icee flavors (we toyed with the idea of using boxes from Costco, but they had a different connector or something for the hose IIRC). We got the thing all together, then began the process of cleaning it - because it hadn't been run in a long time, and there was gunk and other junk inside the parts, etc. It's crazy how complicated Icee machines are - heck, you wouldn't believe the manual for programming them (it used some kind of small 8-bit microcontroller system from the 1980s - probably 8051 or something like that - maybe even a Z80 - but anyhow, it could be programmed to make "the perfect Icee" - of course, in order to really do that, you needed a special scope to allow you to measure ice crystal sizes - I am not joking - the manual was easily 500 pages long). So - we got it clean. Now mind you, again, my boss is paying me as a software developer to do all of this with him, instead of - you know - working on client's software. I don't know what was going thru his head. "Must have Icee" or something crazy like that. So - we get it all done. It's clean, it's right. We plug it in, pressurize the system, follow the steps and turn it on. And it runs... A few hours later, we pull the first Icee. A little runny. Pull a second an hour later. Better. Pull a third 30 minutes later. Pretty much perfect. So there we have it - an Icee machine in our office. It probably cost him $1000 not counting my paycheck - but "free Icees"? Guess what - an office of a few people can't drink that many Icees - not even with a boss who has an addiction. We tried, we couldn't do it. We burned out quick. We also found out that a commercial machine like an Icee machine, if it isn't kept running and used constantly (like you'd see in a convenience store or such) - that it will break down often. And this machine did. Each time costing a lot of money and time to source parts and fix it. One time we had to make a custom tool to pull the impellers that stir the mixture in the freeze chamber (the actual tool was god-aweful expensive), in order to change some seals. It was crazy. Then one day, after Christmas break, but before New Years - one of my coworkers and I had to go into work (we didn't take the days off). I get there early in the morning. Our office was on the third floor. I walk down a hallway to the elevators as normal and see that the ceiling is leaking. I think nothing of it, but plan to call maintenance to let them know. I take the elevator up to the office. I step out of the elevator. Squish. WTF? Look down the hall - water running under the door from our office. SMH. Long story short, my coworker and I got things cleaned up in a jiffy using a shop vac and a rented rug doctor. We called maintenance and let them know, but we played stupid on the water connection and the machine (after they left, I checked the machine, and what had failed was a solenoid valve for the water supply). My boss wasn't pleased when I told him about the problem, but we got it cleaned up (he was at Disneyland over the break) over the day. Maintenance also helped with the cleanup (fans and more shop vacs). I'm not sure what/how maintenance or management said/did to my boss, but the machine was gone in a week.
cr0sh 7y ago
> you’ll still be spending about $3000 for a no-frills entry level fridge. And if you purchase it for use in a non-commercial environment, that'll usually void the warranty. That said, I'd still take it over the standard consumer models. My wife and I wanted to do that ourselves, but without a major kitchen renovation (our house was built in 1973), nothing commercial would fit. So the last time we replaced our fridge (earlier this year) we just got another side-by-side. But you know what? New side-by-sides have (mostly) become larger! And they don't fit into the spaces meant for the refrigerator in 1970s homes! So we couldn't even purchase our "new" fridge "new". Instead, we went to the place where we purchased our first fridge, a local used appliance refurbisher/dealer (who's been in business since the 1970s). We got that fridge when we got our house in 2002; there was actually nothing wrong with the cooling/freezing functions - just that the icemaker and on-door water dispenser no longer worked. So this used appliance lasted us a good 17 years. We ended up getting a similar style fridge and so far it's been great. But anything else, we try to buy commercial, because it's so much better quality (but you have to pay for it). We have a commercial microwave oven (we were tired of having to buy a new oven every time the old one died after a few years of normal usage) - it only has a single knob with a max of 6 minutes of setting and high-cooking only, but that's never been a problem - and the interior is super easy to wipe out, and not having a rotating turntable has never been a problem (if you need to even the cooking out, just stop it and rotate the plate yourself like old-times). It'll probably last forever. A couple of years ago I bought my wife a Robot Coupe food processor. Ugliest appliance I've ever seen - it's basically a box with a 1.5 HP motor in it, with 3 switches (on, off, and pulse). The blade is like razor sharp and heavy steel. Shakes the whole counter when running. Chops and blends anything. Her old Kitchen Aid thing just died after a few years. We also have an older model (early 90s) 4.5 qt Kitchen Aid stand mixer - not their largest model, but the next size down. It's a beast, and has never let us down. I'm not sure if their currently models are any good; I think I would likely go with their commercial offerings if I had to (Hobart). So yeah - commercial is where it's at, if you have the space (for some things) and don't mind the utilitarian look of most of the appliances (we don't care - it needs to work, first and foremost) - oh, and the cost (none of the appliances I mentioned were inexpensive - but that's worth the peace of mind). I also like that they are all super-duper simple; if you know how to cook, you don't need all those fancy controls and settings, and fortunately for me, my wife does know how to cook (she used to work at a place that didn't have an oven, but the place next door was owned by the same owner and had a pizza oven - she learned how to bake cookies properly - and fast - in a 700+ degree oven).

by chomp 7y ago

mauvehaus 7y ago

I looked into commercial ranges, not because I actually intend to purchase one, but because I'd gotten spoiled cooking on one and got curious if it was even feasible to get one. For those of you who haven't cooked on one, one huge perk is that you can get a low simmer with the heat spread fully across the bottom of the pan, not just in the center. It turns out, however, that the standard depth for a commercial cooktop is quite a bit larger than the standard depth for a domestic one. Having worked (briefly, a long time ago) at a chain bakery, I vaguely recall the fridge being a very different size than a domestic one. Sure, you're free to get commercial gear, but you aren't just paying more for the appliances: you're going to be paying to renovate your kitchen to fit them.

nkozyra 7y ago
Completely ignorant on this, but ... how does this differ from a decent home-grade gas range? Does it not depend heavily on the cooking vessel?
- S_A_P 7y ago
  Commercial ranges get hot. Fast. In a big surface area. My father in law was a higher up at a major food company that sounds like a major network equipment manufacturer. He put a commercial kitchen in our barn. It has roughly double the width and 30% deeper than a consumer cooktop. It has 6 eyes and will bring 3 gallons of water to a boil in less than 10 minutes. Preparing a meal in it cooks in a matter of minutes. We use16-20” skillets on it and there is no issue with hot spots. I don’t have the numbers but I wouldn’t doubt if it had triple the btus of even the best home model. The oven is gas and convection and cooks about 30% faster than a standard electric oven. The whole experience is just faster and larger scale. If you have the room and a father in law to pay for it I highly recommend buying one!
  - nkozyra 7y ago
    Mind sending me your wife's phone #? ;)
  - S_A_P 7y ago
    Looked up the model we have it it is a 30,000 BTU cooktop. Looks like the high end “home” cook tops will top out at 18000 btu. I bet the average home cook top is 10-15,000 btu. So I was a bit off, but it is definitely a much hotter stove. It is a very effective heater for the house as well so keep that in mind if you want to go “pro”.
aeyes 7y ago
We have some industrial washing machines and dryers and they each break down at least once a year. But so far it has always been easily fixable. Can't say the same thing about modern home appliances.
jakeogh 7y ago
Try induction. It's like swimming in a salt water pool...

secabeen 7y ago

The other interesting question to consider is: how long do consumers want to run the same fridge? How likely is the fridge to be damaged in some other way that causes the extra life of the 50-year fan to be wasted away in a refuse dump or recycling center? There's a balancing act to do, between too short a lifetime, wherein the customer is not ready to replace the fridge yet when it dies, and too long a lifetime, where resources are spent to make something last a long time, and it gets thrown away anyways. The original video didn't estimate a lifetime for that motor, but I would expect about 15 years is a standard lifetime for that motor, and that about fits with people wanting to replace their fridge at about every 15 years. Sure, some will go to 20 years, and others will fail at 10, but putting a 50 year motor in a fridge is a form of waste. (There's also the angle of increasing efficiency, that also pushes towards a more frequent replacement cycle than 50+ years)

DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
Considering that fridges today have built-in 24” touchscreen displays running Android and cavity cameras so you can see inside your fridge when you’re at the supermarket - the useful life of a fridge is probably on the order of 1-2 years before Google obsoletes the firmware and Samsung shuts-down the video feed relay service.
- nkozyra 7y ago
  I've messed with these in stores and just been blown away at what a useless feature this is. Ah, yes, an appliance running Android Cupcake what a fabulous idea. It's clear that some items have hit peak functionality and manufacturers are just bolting on nonsense to keep up the facade of "luxury." But I'm sorry, running Spotify on my fridge is hokey, gauche and entirely unnecessary.
  - eclipxe 7y ago
    That’s the point.
    - 7y ago

Spooky23 7y ago

That’s what you assume, but entry commercial appliances are garbage just as much as consumer devices. Your best bet is to look for used stuff older than circa-2005. That’s when the efficiency standards increased and manufacturers started undersizing motors in earnest and using all electronic controls that fail. This is especially relevant for refrigerators and washing machines. Our current washing machine is a speed queen laundromat model (sans cash box) that was manufactured in 1988 and that I pulled out of the garbage in 2006 for $0, and put a new clutch in for about $50. There is literally not a better machine made on the market, and the efficiency claims made by modern devices are both questionably accurate and overtaken by the expected lifespan of 5-7 years.

fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
Yeah, our house came with a Viking commercial cabinet depth refrigerator, and it has been warming up on us semi-regularly for no apparent reason and, after a bit of research, I discovered that this isn’t all that that uncommon for these units.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- xxpor 7y ago
  Is it running a de-icing cycle?
  - fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
    I don't think so: I didn't touch anything and it just starts beeping its "high temparature" warning.
chomp 7y ago
I completely agree, and a major growth segment of electronics and appliances has been “pro-sumer” style devices. These are basically the same as their regular consumer devices but either more commercial features and management, or easier support and repair, or is just marketing glitz. It’s very easy to get fooled in this segment and think you are getting quality when you actually aren’t. +1 for Speed Queen. I hear the newer ones aren’t the same but still way better than the same ol’ white labelled electrolux appliances that are rebadged to every brand on the market.

mindslight 7y ago

Converting the cost into "modern currency" is missing the larger problem though. As companies are making things cheaper to produce, the overt government policy is to debase the currency so that nominal prices go up instead. Wages nominally rise too, but not nearly as much. So we get left with cheaply made appliances that actually aren't cheap, while the savings get funneled upwards.

lb1lf 7y ago

I'll recycle a comment I made in another thread a year ago: When clearing out my grandmother's house a few years ago, my uncle and I almost broke our backs trying to get the freezer out. It felt like it weighed a ton, even empty. My grandmother told us it had been a wedding present, and that they had been totally awestruck at the time at the generous present from her parents-in-law. After all, a decent freezer cost at least 2,000 kroner! (At this time, the average yearly gross pay was just in excess of 7,000 kroner.) My grandparents married in 1950. Since then, monetary value has been reduced twenty-fold. You can still buy a top-loading freezer for 2,000 kroner; I just checked. So - in 1950, you had to work for five months to earn money for a freezer (after taxes.) In 2017, I have to work one day for a freezer (after taxes.)

Tepix 7y ago

It takes fractions of a penny to make something with electronics last several years longer than just the minimum 2-5 years. Yet the device manufacturer chooses the short-lived version. Consumers should demand devices that have a long life and can be easily repaired ideally by yourself. As long as there are rapid technological advances, consumers do not care about the lack of longevity and the resulting waste. Our parents had long-lasting household appliances, radios and TVs that could be repaired. It was considered standard to receive a circuit diagram with your device.

sokoloff 7y ago
It costs more BOM money now and manufacturers will sell fewer of them in the future. And so they don’t choose that path...

throwawaycanada 7y ago

>You’re free to buy appliances like the stuff that used to exist. They are found in the commercial realm, and you’ll still be spending about $3000 for a no-frills entry level fridge. You can certainly pay that. And they are better than residential. But they are not like old residential. Often these "made to fail" products actually cost more to engineer than products that last longer. It's just the company makes more money by selling you two of something than one of something.

cr0sh 7y ago
Something to also be aware of is that some commercial "appliances" should never be installed in a "residential" (or anything close to it) setting. I once had an employer who had this extreme Icee addiction. Our office was near a 7-11, and he'd be over there getting an Icee all the time. Well - one day he was one Craigslist, and found an Icee machine someone was selling for a few hundred dollars. Since I was the only one with a pickup truck, he enlisted me and all the other software developers to go and pick up this machine - he was going to install it in the office. Yeah - he made terrible decisions like that - apparently paying us to do manual labor at software development rates was a-ok. So we go and get this machine - heaviest darn thing I've ever seen, short of the cast iron fire place insert my parents had. We get it wrestled into my pickup, and drive it back to the office. We carefully get it up to the office. Then began the long process of making it functional. He dragged me all over the place, I'm not sure why I was the picked guy. But we went to ace hardware, various welding supply places (needed CO2), and several other places - to get all the special hoses and other parts to fix the darn thing. Some parts we could only get from Icee itself - fortunately there was a local distributor - and I don't know how he swung it, but he managed to not only get parts, but also to get Icee flavors (we toyed with the idea of using boxes from Costco, but they had a different connector or something for the hose IIRC). We got the thing all together, then began the process of cleaning it - because it hadn't been run in a long time, and there was gunk and other junk inside the parts, etc. It's crazy how complicated Icee machines are - heck, you wouldn't believe the manual for programming them (it used some kind of small 8-bit microcontroller system from the 1980s - probably 8051 or something like that - maybe even a Z80 - but anyhow, it could be programmed to make "the perfect Icee" - of course, in order to really do that, you needed a special scope to allow you to measure ice crystal sizes - I am not joking - the manual was easily 500 pages long). So - we got it clean. Now mind you, again, my boss is paying me as a software developer to do all of this with him, instead of - you know - working on client's software. I don't know what was going thru his head. "Must have Icee" or something crazy like that. So - we get it all done. It's clean, it's right. We plug it in, pressurize the system, follow the steps and turn it on. And it runs... A few hours later, we pull the first Icee. A little runny. Pull a second an hour later. Better. Pull a third 30 minutes later. Pretty much perfect. So there we have it - an Icee machine in our office. It probably cost him $1000 not counting my paycheck - but "free Icees"? Guess what - an office of a few people can't drink that many Icees - not even with a boss who has an addiction. We tried, we couldn't do it. We burned out quick. We also found out that a commercial machine like an Icee machine, if it isn't kept running and used constantly (like you'd see in a convenience store or such) - that it will break down often. And this machine did. Each time costing a lot of money and time to source parts and fix it. One time we had to make a custom tool to pull the impellers that stir the mixture in the freeze chamber (the actual tool was god-aweful expensive), in order to change some seals. It was crazy. Then one day, after Christmas break, but before New Years - one of my coworkers and I had to go into work (we didn't take the days off). I get there early in the morning. Our office was on the third floor. I walk down a hallway to the elevators as normal and see that the ceiling is leaking. I think nothing of it, but plan to call maintenance to let them know. I take the elevator up to the office. I step out of the elevator. Squish. WTF? Look down the hall - water running under the door from our office. SMH. Long story short, my coworker and I got things cleaned up in a jiffy using a shop vac and a rented rug doctor. We called maintenance and let them know, but we played stupid on the water connection and the machine (after they left, I checked the machine, and what had failed was a solenoid valve for the water supply). My boss wasn't pleased when I told him about the problem, but we got it cleaned up (he was at Disneyland over the break) over the day. Maintenance also helped with the cleanup (fans and more shop vacs). I'm not sure what/how maintenance or management said/did to my boss, but the machine was gone in a week.

cr0sh 7y ago

> you’ll still be spending about $3000 for a no-frills entry level fridge. And if you purchase it for use in a non-commercial environment, that'll usually void the warranty. That said, I'd still take it over the standard consumer models. My wife and I wanted to do that ourselves, but without a major kitchen renovation (our house was built in 1973), nothing commercial would fit. So the last time we replaced our fridge (earlier this year) we just got another side-by-side. But you know what? New side-by-sides have (mostly) become larger! And they don't fit into the spaces meant for the refrigerator in 1970s homes! So we couldn't even purchase our "new" fridge "new". Instead, we went to the place where we purchased our first fridge, a local used appliance refurbisher/dealer (who's been in business since the 1970s). We got that fridge when we got our house in 2002; there was actually nothing wrong with the cooling/freezing functions - just that the icemaker and on-door water dispenser no longer worked. So this used appliance lasted us a good 17 years. We ended up getting a similar style fridge and so far it's been great. But anything else, we try to buy commercial, because it's so much better quality (but you have to pay for it). We have a commercial microwave oven (we were tired of having to buy a new oven every time the old one died after a few years of normal usage) - it only has a single knob with a max of 6 minutes of setting and high-cooking only, but that's never been a problem - and the interior is super easy to wipe out, and not having a rotating turntable has never been a problem (if you need to even the cooking out, just stop it and rotate the plate yourself like old-times). It'll probably last forever. A couple of years ago I bought my wife a Robot Coupe food processor. Ugliest appliance I've ever seen - it's basically a box with a 1.5 HP motor in it, with 3 switches (on, off, and pulse). The blade is like razor sharp and heavy steel. Shakes the whole counter when running. Chops and blends anything. Her old Kitchen Aid thing just died after a few years. We also have an older model (early 90s) 4.5 qt Kitchen Aid stand mixer - not their largest model, but the next size down. It's a beast, and has never let us down. I'm not sure if their currently models are any good; I think I would likely go with their commercial offerings if I had to (Hobart). So yeah - commercial is where it's at, if you have the space (for some things) and don't mind the utilitarian look of most of the appliances (we don't care - it needs to work, first and foremost) - oh, and the cost (none of the appliances I mentioned were inexpensive - but that's worth the peace of mind). I also like that they are all super-duper simple; if you know how to cook, you don't need all those fancy controls and settings, and fortunately for me, my wife does know how to cook (she used to work at a place that didn't have an oven, but the place next door was owned by the same owner and had a pizza oven - she learned how to bake cookies properly - and fast - in a 700+ degree oven).