3 ms·

You're missing the point entirely. I want to buy a thing, not rent it, whether that's for 5 years or in perpetuity... I'm tired of paying rent.

api 7y ago
You're right, but the problem is that businesses must have recurring revenue to exist. During the roll out phase, such as when appliances were a new thing and everyone wanted to buy one, companies could make super reliable appliances and they would still get recurring revenue because there was a ton of unmet demand. Now everyone has a fridge, washing machine, etc. If they all lasted 30 years you would have a serious problem with keeping the supply chain alive. In the end what would probably happen is that the price would explode since now a new fridge would be more of a small run custom manufacturing job than a mass produced item. Trouble there is that people won't pay $2000 for a fridge even if it is extremely well built and will last 30 years. Play this out and you can see what happens. Enter the cheap competitors who make appliances that last 5 years... pretty soon the market looks exactly like it does today. Large industrial supply chains aren't simple machines. You basically can't turn them off and then on again. A ton of the seemingly irrational nonsense in markets stems from the fact that everything has to find recurring revenue to stay "hot" or you just lose it entirely. We can't go back to the moon because we stopped going, so we lost the supply chain for the Saturn V.
- jogjayr 7y ago
  As long as the population and number of new households keeps increasing, there will always be demand for new appliances. The analogy to the Saturn V doesn't really hold up. There's also a ton of unmet demand in developing countries. Companies can continue to have their always-growing markets of yesteryear over there.
- dreamcompiler 7y ago
  Or the government ties tax policy to the robustness of their products. 5 year lifetime? 90% tax for you!
- alextingle 7y ago
  > Trouble there is that people won't pay $2000 for a fridge even if it is extremely well built and will last 30 years. It's all about expectation management. Of course people today would be shocked by huge price rises, but eventually, as the "new normal" bedded in, no one would bat an eye. Take light bulbs as an example. Here in the UK filament bulbs used to regularly burn out, and the replacements cost maybe £1 each. When filament bulbs were phased out, compact fluorescents (CF) were subsidised and cost... about £1 each. The entire light bulb "fleet" was changed over with very little fuss. Now these new bulbs last for 20 years, so the number of replacements we need to buy is minimal. I can't buy CFs in shops these days, it's all LEDs, and they cost £6 each. But nobody cares, because lightbulbs are no longer an every day purchase. In fact, I recently fitted new lights in a room, and a friend of mine was baffled by the LED bulbs. He'd never seen them, _because all of his own old CFs were still working._

api 7y ago

You're right, but the problem is that businesses must have recurring revenue to exist. During the roll out phase, such as when appliances were a new thing and everyone wanted to buy one, companies could make super reliable appliances and they would still get recurring revenue because there was a ton of unmet demand. Now everyone has a fridge, washing machine, etc. If they all lasted 30 years you would have a serious problem with keeping the supply chain alive. In the end what would probably happen is that the price would explode since now a new fridge would be more of a small run custom manufacturing job than a mass produced item. Trouble there is that people won't pay $2000 for a fridge even if it is extremely well built and will last 30 years. Play this out and you can see what happens. Enter the cheap competitors who make appliances that last 5 years... pretty soon the market looks exactly like it does today. Large industrial supply chains aren't simple machines. You basically can't turn them off and then on again. A ton of the seemingly irrational nonsense in markets stems from the fact that everything has to find recurring revenue to stay "hot" or you just lose it entirely. We can't go back to the moon because we stopped going, so we lost the supply chain for the Saturn V.

jogjayr 7y ago
As long as the population and number of new households keeps increasing, there will always be demand for new appliances. The analogy to the Saturn V doesn't really hold up. There's also a ton of unmet demand in developing countries. Companies can continue to have their always-growing markets of yesteryear over there.
dreamcompiler 7y ago
Or the government ties tax policy to the robustness of their products. 5 year lifetime? 90% tax for you!
alextingle 7y ago
> Trouble there is that people won't pay $2000 for a fridge even if it is extremely well built and will last 30 years. It's all about expectation management. Of course people today would be shocked by huge price rises, but eventually, as the "new normal" bedded in, no one would bat an eye. Take light bulbs as an example. Here in the UK filament bulbs used to regularly burn out, and the replacements cost maybe £1 each. When filament bulbs were phased out, compact fluorescents (CF) were subsidised and cost... about £1 each. The entire light bulb "fleet" was changed over with very little fuss. Now these new bulbs last for 20 years, so the number of replacements we need to buy is minimal. I can't buy CFs in shops these days, it's all LEDs, and they cost £6 each. But nobody cares, because lightbulbs are no longer an every day purchase. In fact, I recently fitted new lights in a room, and a friend of mine was baffled by the LED bulbs. He'd never seen them, _because all of his own old CFs were still working._