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While I'm not defending the fact that many companies do rip people off in their spare parts prices, > Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and mo

• chris_wot 5y ago
  It works fine for cars, there is a massive third party market.
• adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  Right, and those aspects are expensive because they don't have economies of scale because they either don't really want people to use them too much, and if people do want to use them they'll squeeze them. They'd rather people scrap machines and get new ones. And even if I then swear off "unreliable" Hotpoint machines and go for Siemens, some Siemens customer will make the reverse trip, so they all profit together. If they all had to provide all the parts at a reasonable cost, they'd figure out a way to get it done. I'm sure Siemens, say, can figure out a way to ship a part by part number efficiently, considering its already on a shelf somewhere. And if you a company don't want to pay for that? Use a standard part. Now it's not your problem. It'll never happen, but it's nice to think about as the world drowns in piles of ruined single-use equipment, while the money spent on replacing them flows endlessly corporate pockets.
  • sokoloff 5y ago
    That’s the thing: they’re already selling the service parts at a reasonable cost. What’s “too cheap” in your situation is the highly automated, continuous conveyance, mass production line that can take in parts by the container load and pump out fully-functioning dishwashers for less than a week’s wages.
    • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      > That’s the thing: they’re already selling the service parts at a reasonable cost What is the basis for this assetion? What data or information have you used to come to this conclusion?
      • sokoloff 5y ago
        That there are a variety of OEM and third-party parts suppliers to choose from and when I buy appliance parts, I frequently find them to be “pretty what I expect them to cost as compared to automobile service parts”. This is not a monopolized supply chain. The last appliance part I bought was the motor for my gas dryer. Several parts places had it. Amazon had the best price by a small amount and I got an exact fit OE motor in 2 days for $114. A year later, that price has soared to $109 and is now available for next-day delivery. How much less do you think it should possibly cost to be able to order an exact fit ~10 pound, ~1/3 HP dryer motor on a Sunday for Monday delivery? $109 seems like an incredible bargain to me, even if Amazon and Frigidaire pocketed $20 each of pure, obscene profit. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0053Y3A8M/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i_HBNCZMQZ8ZJNAWFS58RX?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0053Y3A8M/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_...
    • Schroedingersat 5y ago
      They can just put every tenth one in the box unassembled. Problem solved.
  • newaccount74 5y ago
    Bosch/Siemens actually have really good website for buying spare parts and they sell them at reasonable prices even to consumers, and even for things that cost <50€.
• ghaff 5y ago
  There are a ton of third-party parts companies--which do tend to be somewhat cheaper, albeit of probably more variable quality. So unless you assume there's some global conspiracy of spare parts pricing, you're probably seeing a reflection of a bunch of piece parts actually costing more than the assembled appliance/car/etc.
• resoluteteeth 5y ago
  > You're forgetting that the spare part also needs similar logistics, shipping, support, etc. around it, so you would expect ordering one of every part separately to cost far more than ordering a single machine even before they put any further markup on it. This seems like a problem that could be solved by standardizing the parts among multiple models (possibly between different brands), so if legally mandating availability of replacement parts encourages that, it might not be a bad thing.
  • rrdharan 5y ago
    Why even have multiple brands? Why not just have the government enforce a single manufacturer for each type of item and standardize everything? They could plan if all centrally and… oh wait.
    • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      Why have any rules about what the manufacturers must do at all? Let them sell us autonomous cars for $1,000 which need a $5,000 subscribtion to drive. Oh, you want to put child i a car, the car won't start unless you add a child add-on. Oh, you need to go to the hospital, because your wife is giving birth, that will be extra $5,000 one-time fee.
      • adhesive_wombat 5y ago
        I can hear Amazon's self driving car division furiously taking notes.
    • adhesive_wombat 5y ago
      The point is, if you don't want to support spares for your device, you have the option of using standard parts. If you want your own part, you have to either make it available, or you have to make it reliable enough that you don't need to. That would remind the incentive to have parts that fail be profitable. Making unreliable and unserviceable devices should cost you more.
• ethbr0 5y ago
  The seeming ridiculousness of the price difference is another way of looking at how hyper-efficient modern mass manufacturing is. Their original cost for that part is miniscule. BUT! That's the cost of that part, being delivered to the assembly line, in bulk quantities, at a regular, predictable order cadence from the upstream supplier, over an unchanging delivery route, with minimal inventory kept on hand. Essentially, everything they can do to reduce the cost. None of those things are true for a replacement part you order. It's an entirely different logistics chain, with entirely different costs.
  • brtkdotse 5y ago
    > The seeming ridiculousness of the price difference is another way of looking at how hyper-efficient modern mass manufacturing is. Reminds me of the Planet Money multipart story where they made a tshirt, from scratch. Bought cotton from a farmer, shipped it to a textile industry, contacted a tshirt making company, shipped it to the US. The bulk of the cost in the end came from transporting the tshirt from the harbor to the store where it was sold.
  • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    > That's the cost of that part, being delivered to the assembly line, in bulk quantities, at a regular, predictable order cadence from the upstream supplier I am not buting this reasoning - the assebly line costs money to run, worker's time and salaries need to be paid, quality control and warranty to be done. A part sold by itself needs none of those things. While you are taling to me about how difficult logistics of a $200 part justifies a 500% markup, i can buy a $3 led from China with free shipping. This doesnt add up
    • judge2020 5y ago
      This is generally because USPS effectively subsidizes international shipment. The same $2 LED shipment might be $10 DHL (and free shipping isn’t free, the seller is making their margins with shipping costs included).
      • 5y ago
• Closi 5y ago
  A spare part does not need similar logistics or shipping - in the case of a dishwasher for instance the delivery of a dishwasher requires a 2-person delivery which likely costs c£60-£70 in the UK, while a motor would be sent through a parcel carrier for c£3.50-£5. Sure, ordering and delivering all the parts separately and individually would be more expensive, but let’s also not pretend that selling and shipping spare parts is prohibitively difficult and costly.
  • jakear 5y ago
    Why would a dishwasher need two people to deliver it in UK? Just one dude and a couple wheels is all I’ve seen needed in US.
    • swarnie 5y ago
      It doesn't, my last dishwasher, washing machine and dryer all came with a single bloke and his trolley in the UK.
      • Closi 5y ago
        In the UK from most retailers this would be a 2 person delivery (and typically white goods form a large part of the volume of 2-man delivery networks).
    • Closi 5y ago
      > Why would a dishwasher need two people to deliver it in UK? Just one dude and a couple wheels is all I’ve seen needed in US. Usually retailers will offer "room of choice" delivery in the UK for these sort of appliances, which means that the dishwasher will be delivered into the house which often requires a 2-person delivery. If you required an item such as a dishwasher to be delivered to a flat for instance, rather than just dropped off curbside outside a block of flats, that would typically require a 2-person delivery in the UK (See services such as DX 2-Man as an example of this type of operation). Secondly, there is often a requirement for light assembly (i.e. simple installation, removal of packaging, plug in the appliance) which is usually a paid addition by the customer. As soon as you do this, it's often more effective to have all deliveries be 2-person rather than split up the delivery territories (although if you are going through a pallet network, depending on the item and service required, you may be able to split these). If you don't need this and just want it dropping off outside the customers home (curbside delivery), the cost would usually be c£40 via a pallet network.
• christophilus 5y ago
  There are also perverse subsidies at play. My dad is in manufacturing, and realized that he could buy a complete, assembled part from his Chinese competitor for less than he could get the raw steel involved in manufacturing it. I imagine similar skewing is part of the story for the dishwasher.
• ok123456 5y ago
  Sears had a parts department where you could buy replacement appliance parts on appliance brands they sold. This is not a totally radical concept.
  • rr808 5y ago
    True, Sears had a great traditional operation with full pricing, well trained and paid employees, good service and sensible follow up support. However most people seem to want cheap appliances they can throw out and replace which is why Sears went bankrupt.
• nelgaard 5y ago
  Yes, and we all could understand say a 200 percent markup plus international shipping. And even more for a cheap part. But they make it really hard to get the parts. In 2010 my Fisher-Paykel dishwasher broke. I called the repair service. They charged a little over $100 to tell me that it would cost DKK 6500 ($950) to replace the two broken water softener modules. I spent a long time time searching for a place to buy those modules. Eventually I found a place called Leeds Applicances (closed now) that would sell it to me for £68 + VAT + £20 shipping. I took me maybe 30 minutes to replace the modules, just a lot of connectors and tubes that had to be connected the same way. Before that I had a dryer that started to make a horrible rattling sound. I refused to just replace the dryer and took it apart. I was some nylon wheel on the belt drive that was worn out. But no one was selling a replacement. I spent about a month complaining to the importer and in the end I went on my bicycle to the Zanussi importer in an industrial area outside Copenhagen and after waiting in their office for a long time I was allowed to buy this piece of nylon for $50. It probably cost less than $1 to produce and they had newer sold one to a consumer before.
• ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  Yes, but the company that assembles the (eg., in my case) an oven is 30minutes away from my home, and the company that makes the railings for the trays is 5 minutes away, but the railing mechanism still costs 100eur. Lets be real here, the companies want you to buy a new product, and expensive parts are just one of the parts of planned obsolescence.
• estaseuropano 5y ago
  I have a two year old Bauknecht machine. Sadly realized too late the brand had been bought by the consumer-hating Whirlpool group. 600€ for a machine, that breaks exactly 25 months after we started using it. Lots of small plastic parts already broke in this time period as well, e.g. the basket. It would be 180€ to get it repaired, spare parts are not available even aftermarket/Ali baba/... But then I know I'm going to need to call them once a year or so - so instead we buy a miele which is a higher initial price but longer lifetime in every test a d at least decent reparability.
• Someone 5y ago
  Worse logistics, I would think. With spare parts, you have to keep the machinery and the knowledge to produce spare parts around for a X years, or make sure your parts won’t degrade for X years, predict how many you’ll need, produce them up-front, and pay for storage. That worked reasonably well when machines had fairly standard replacement parts. If your part doesn’t change for years, keeping manufacturing knowledge is almost free, and predicting the number of parts needed easier because of the law of large numbers (if you sell ten variants of a design, you may know you’ll need 100,000 ± 10,000 replacement widgets, but for each part that may mean 10,000 ± 5,000, so you’d have to stock 10 × 15,000, knowing you likely won’t need 40,000 of them) However, current hardware production is very flexible. Making a part slightly different to slightly improve a design is doable (examples in electronics: ASICS, custom battery sizes, custom LCD panels). Do that ten times in a single design, and the resulting device is significantly better. I think this kind of regulation will trigger a lot of innovation in hardware manufacturing, and may still lead to products that are (slightly) worse if you ignore repairability.
  • HWR_14 5y ago
    > Do that ten times in a single design, and the resulting device is significantly better. Honestly, I would be very tempted by appliances/cars that said "we've been using these parts for 20 years, and expect to do so forever so replacement parts won't be an issue". I believe some European car makers did that very thing. Yes, it won't have certain definitions of "better", but repairability is a feature.
  • Schroedingersat 5y ago
    New cars are bigger, uglier, use more fuel (due to size and excessive power), and are more expensive. New appliances do nothing other than have more cumbersome interfaces and spy on you. There's argument for heat pumps in things, but just have a standard chassis or 3 variants with enough space. Give me a datsun sunny with standardized injerctors and a catalytic converter, then keep making the same thing with the same frame with a drop in standard 100hp electric motor and however many 12V 200Ah drop in lithium batteries I want to carry. If it's unsafe, add a roll cage, and a 5 point harness. If it's still unsafe lower speed limits, design better roads, and only let people who are highly trained drive. Or a 250cc twin motorbike with 15 hp that weighs 110kg Or a raileigh pusbike with a 3 speed sun gearbox, drum brakes and a brazed chromolly frame that will still be working after a carbon frame has turned to shards from UV or an alu or hi ten frame is cracked due to corrosion and work hardening and on its 10th drivetrain. Or the same kettle or toaster or microwave that's been made for decades with simple dials and switches but without changing the shape for no reason or a byzantine menu to reverse engineer back to power and time (the only things that mattere and the interface often used in the 50s). Make TVs a simple display with a standard mounting point for a standard power supply and a general purpose computer.
• Schroedingersat 5y ago
  Gather the pars for one as normal, but leave out all the glue and leave the plastic clips undone Put it in the same container as all the others. Send it to the same retailer. If one part fails a lot, shove a crate full of those in the same container. Maximum cost: Add the fraction of your products that need repairs over wholesale. If lots of machines need repairs you've fucked up and should he paying more or figuring out better logistics.