> This really stood out to me. If I bought a washer here in the US and it broke after two years, I expect I’d be on my own. You probably would be. The US has b

> This really stood out to me. If I bought a washer here in the US and it broke after two years, I expect I’d be on my own. You probably would be. The US has by far the weakest consumer law of any Western country. Possibly the most egregious example of this is that businesses can advertise something as costing $5, you walk into the store with a crisp $5 bill to purchase it, and then get told that you don't have enough money. Whenever this is mentioned online there's typically a flood of people who live in America commenting on how that's totally normal and "there's nothing they can do dude", completely oblivious to how absolutely mental that idea is to the rest of the planet. So I think your idea of it just being a case of growing up in a system without consumer protections making it seem normal is correct. > I don’t feel like an insurance fight and waiting for a service call while I have a pile of wet laundry and another of dirty. Ah, but here you've missed the trick! Yes, if your product broke and you needed to get a completely new one and/or a full refund, that's a pain in the arse. But it's an even bigger pain in the arse for the business, who functionally just lost the entire value of the product. They're incentivised to prevent that from happening. The effect of this law isn't actually to give you an option if a product is broken (although it does that as well), the purpose of it is to make manufacturers stop selling broken products. Because they know that you can get a full refund for years after the point of sale, they make damn-well sure that the product lasts that long.