18 ms·

O Holy Crap

• tarr11 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • jtbayly 4y ago
    Where, pray tell, is one supposed to shop in order to find real products that will last? And I’ll go further. Is there a single brand you can recommend that will last, regardless of where I’m supposed to purchase it?
    • 83 4y ago
      https://hamiltonbeachcommercial.com/ https://hamiltonbeachcommercial.com/ I've been quite impressed with the few of their commercial items I have. The important parts are metal, and clearly a lot of though went into design (things like the blender jar being designed so there's nowhere for water to pool after you wash and set it upside down). The only unimpressive thing is the price.
  • ryaniscool 4y ago
    What's the alternative in modern society? The village craftsman building single-source hand-forged juicers no longer exists.
  • Jupe 4y ago
    Any alternatives? We are "lucky" to have a Target, Walmart, Meijer, Nieman Marcus, Khols and Macy's nearby. (Sears and Hudsons have gone). But, from my experience, on many product lines, they sell the same "crap".
• hoosieree 4y ago
  Part of the reason we equate "old" with "good" like that 70 year old juicer is survivor bias. We don't dig through the landfill to find out how many broken 70 year old juicers are buried there. That said, I suspect that in another 70 years, Walter's juicer will still work, but you won't find any working examples of juicers from 2022. It should be obvious to most people at this point that any appliance with the word "smart" in its marketing really means "smarter than you, sucker".
  • ddejohn 4y ago
    Isn't there something to be said for the volume of anecdotal evidence of older appliances of higher quality? Like, is it really survivor bias if older appliances have a (perceived) significantly higher probability of lasting? Sure, some items may not have lasted, some may be flukes, but if you compare the relative quantities of "older appliances still working" vs "new appliances still working", the proportion of older appliances to the total from "that era" is likely much higher than now. I have no evidence to back my statements up, and I'm using extremely vague language, but this is at least my perception of this idea that "they don't make 'em like they used to."
    • fuzzfactor 4y ago
      It's the proliferation of credit combined with increasing ubiquity of equating consumerism with success. Using other people's money to act like you can afford the things that other people who have much more money than you can actually afford. The easier and more common this has gotten, the crummier deal everyone ends up getting for their money. Back when average consumers still had to save money for years before making big-ticket purchases, the shrewdest of manufacturers achieved the greatest success with product lifetimes having quite good multiples of those saving years. When that became no longer as much of an issue, then never mind. Expanded credit opened up opportunities for spendthrifts to dominate, who love to consume so much that they replace purchases that are still perfectly good after a few years anyway. Remember all those 70-year-old juicers where there's far more in the landfills than remaining in the kitchen? Most of those were landfilled while they were still working.
• vages 4y ago
  Be aware that survivorship bias may fool you when comparing the quality of new and old items. The single juicer that lasts 70 years may be the only one of its kind to last that long, the others from the same production year being left to rot and rust in a landfill. That being said, I definitely believe that planned obsolesence and unintentional bad quality is a plague on modern consumer items. I am lucky enough to have the time, knowledge, persistence and money to research and buy long lasting goods. For example, I have bought kitchen knives made out of a single piece of metal, which are therefore less prone to breaking than the run-off-the-mill ones. My jeans are from a Swedish jeans company that offer in-store repairs as long as it's practical. This is saving me money and effort in the long run. However, I do not believe in such individual solutions to what is essentially a systemic problem; people should expect good consumer items without researching beforehand like it was their hobby. I'm glad that the EU is working hard on right-to-repair laws.
  • jtbayly 4y ago
    Metal, vs plastic gears. Bigger vs tiny electric motor. Metal vs plastic moving parts in contact with the fruit. Plug-in vs battery powered. These are the things that I would place money on as the reasons the 70 year old one is still functioning, and none sold today will work in 5 years. (I’ve never looked at one of these items. I’m just guessing. But I’d still place money on it.)
    • yetihehe 4y ago
      > Metal, vs plastic gears. Sintered metal gears, last only a little longer than plastic and then fail catastrophically destroying half of the device so that you can't repair it. But at least they are much cheaper than proper machined gears.
      • JKCalhoun 4y ago
        My KitchenAid mixer ate a gear many years ago. They would lead you to believe they are a high quality brand, no? After disassembly, it turned out to be perhaps the only plastic gear in the thing. It occurred to me that it was perhaps designed to fail rather than the mixer continuing to break the bones of the person who got their hand caught in the paddle. So, I throw the engineer a bone for that one. I was bummed though to have to order a replacement gear from some obscure place in Florida for like $75 or whatever.
• eggy 4y ago
  Products with guarantees are for a replacement with the same short-lasting product, not a guarantee on the one physical item you originally purchased. It's cheaper for manufacturer's to send you another POS than to spend the time and charging a bit more for a product that will last. People have been conditioned to follow the percolator-drip-French press-espresso machine-Keurig cycle! I keep a steel cone sieve and buy beans I have the store grind for me. I too have gone through 3 or 4 coffee grinders. I just got back from Saudi after working there for 6 months, and being sober for years, I found it a land of coffee shops vs. pubs and bars. Most people had a simple, traditional Arabic (now rebranded "Saudi") coffee setup, or a Keurig or Nespresso machine in their home or Bedouin tent. My Mom and Dad had the same percolator for over 18 years. Maybe not a coffee connoisseur's preference, but it always worked if the gas bill was paid!
• wincy 4y ago
  My $4000 GE refrigerator has broken twice now in the five years we have owned it, both times in the exact same way. The way the fridge works seems simple: the cold freezer is on the bottom, and then a fan blows air up through a shaft to the relatively warmer refrigerator as needed to keep it just above freezing. Instead, the failure state is that the fan that handles this broke with no warning. I lost a bunch of groceries, but luckily managed to figure out the issue and replace the part myself. Then a few months ago I heard a clack clack like a fan was about to fail, so this time I replaced the fan after only about two days of no refrigerator. I don’t understand how such an expensive device can have such a terrible failure mode that ruins basically everything inside my fridge, twice now (the freezer is fine though, it just gets colder). Before this fridge my wife and I were totally broke and just had a $400 hand me down fridge that we literally never had any problems with. I don’t really know why modern stuff seems so bad. I know I know, survivorship bias and whatnot, I don’t see all the broken refrigerators in the landfill, but even if that’s the case why not fire half your design engineers just trot out those old 1945 GE Ultracool (or whatever) designs and sell those?
  • bayindirh 4y ago
    Two reasons: 1. Newer fridges have much more complicated air flow patterns requiring more fans and elaborate designs (my fridge runs all its fans for 2 seconds to homogenize air every time I close its door, for example). 2. That fan is a standard fan in GE line-up which happens to fit that bill. It's not a fan made extra robust and reliable because it's going to end in a $4000 fridge.
  • rzzzt 4y ago
    We got a compressor fridge from the now non-existent GDR 50-ish years ago, and it finally broke this year. Still cools, just non-stop (the temperature sensing switch gave up the ghost). I occasionally think about cybernetically enhancing it with an ESP8266, a relay and a sensor.
    • empyrrhicist 4y ago
      Just grab a Johnson Controls temperature controller. Set and forget.
• bambax 4y ago
  > Many blamed these problems on the government. They believed it had crippled certain products (major home appliances, especially) This is a claim that was already present in Death of a Salesman. Here's the quote: > I am always in a race with the junkyard! I just finished paying for the car and it's on its last legs. The refrigerator consumes belts like a goddam maniac. They time those things. They time them so when you finally paid for them, they're used up. The play came out in... 1949. It's not been my experience that everything is crap nowadays. But of course one needs to shop wisely.
  • robinsonb5 4y ago
    The difficulty is that the abundance of cheap crap often makes finding the good stuff like finding a needle in a haystack. Yes, price is the first indicator, but there are plenty of chancers who are quite happy to sell the cheap crap at the premium price point.
    • theK 4y ago
      Yes that is exactly the problem. Especially with cheap as garbage direct sales from China and internet shopping being the norm, your chances of finding legitimate high quality sellers on amazon or else are practically zero. Even worse, nowadays on amazon you find the exact same product in all the price ranges sold by "different" sellers.
      • pbhjpbhj 4y ago
        There's a need for legislation here IMO. Trademarks identify the origin of goods that a business wishes a consumer to believe. We need to expand that law to also indicate _actual_ origin. For example, this DVD player came from this manufacturer and then got badged as Alpha Inc, but this other DVD had the same technical origin (despite the different case) and got badged as Beta Inc ... consumers should get that information. Capitalism relies on such things so that the best products can be chosen. Instead, we get things like companies selling the same product code from different factories with wildly different quality. Or, far more egregious companies sending a product to reviewers and early adopters, then making a worse product and passing it off to consumers as the same. There's much more to do (I should be able to see exactly what a product had done to acquire it's 'country of origin' - another area companies deceive consumers), but this would be a start.
• theK 4y ago
  Who was the guy that said "humanity signed its death certificate once MBAs found out that they can literally sell trash as long as it is cheap enough to make it inconvenient to return"? No one? Was it just me then?
  • PopAlongKid 4y ago
    What the MBAs "found out" pertains to the consumer, not the product. Discovering that something exists is not the same as creating it.
    • BlueTemplar 4y ago
      Invention and discovery were the same latin word in the early modern age : patents were granted for discoveries in the Americas.
• h2odragon 4y ago
  Who needs most of this crap? I have a knife. It is a simple piece of metal that peels carrots, apples, and many other things with great reliability. It also performs other functions that a "carrot peeler" could not. It has done so for 20 years and can be expected to remain functional for several more decades. "Coffee grinder"? how many iterations of the idea of the blender does one kitchen need? (I count a half dozen in my kitchen without trying. 4 more if you add in the lab gear)
  • zenexer 4y ago
    It depends. You probably have a typical coffee brewer. Those aren’t too picky about their grind, but they take up a lot of space and only do one thing. Most don’t last long. You could instead get a V60 for about $10 and a nice hand grinder, neither of which take much space. Combine those with an electric tea kettle, and you’ve got nicer coffee in a smaller footprint. The tea kettle still takes up space, but it’s a tea kettle. The grinder is the size of a pepper mill, and the V60 is an indestructible little plastic cone. Tired of cranking the grinder by hand? Hook it up to a drill. You could use a blender-style grinder with a V60, but you’re going to run into trouble getting it to work right. Everything is a compromise.
  • thesaintlives 4y ago
    I tried grinding coffee in the blender just after my divorce. Did not work so great...
  • wincy 4y ago
    I mean I use a peeler because my kids like to help cook and I don’t want to give a four year old a sharp kitchen knife. I don’t drink coffee but a nicely built hand powered coffee grinder is great at home or even on a camping trip for people who are really into coffee. But you’re probably right, I bet my $400 Vitamix could grind coffee. Actually, I just googled it, and Vitamix helpfully sells a coffee grinder attachment! Haha, the gadgets never end.
  • robinsonb5 4y ago
    I had a knife. It wasn't a simple piece of metal - it had a nicely sculpted handle with that horrible tactile silicone coating which gets gross and sticky over time and is really hard to clean (mild abrasive such as bicarbonate of soda will either clean it or remove it - and frankly I'm good with either outcome!) A few months back this knife fell to pieces when the handle split, causing the blade to do an interesting backflip maneouvre that I'd have preferred to spectate from much further away. While I'm ranting about kitchenwares, I'm getting tired of saucepans with a life expectancy of less than two years - they're another item I'd expect to last decades. But again the existence of the cheap crap makes it harder to find the better stuff, and certainly hard to have any confidence that what you're looking actually is any better, and not just the same crap with a higher price tag.
• thesaintlives 4y ago
  A friend owns a bagless early 1960s Electrolux canister vacuum cleaner. It is still going strong. Really nice design, cast aluminum parts and sucking like a champ. Dyson? Don't make me laugh....
• teekert 4y ago
  I have Philips vacuum cleaner, I guess it's 30 years old. Some ducttape on the hose but still going strong. I bought a cordless one 2 years ago (also Philips, 8000 series), really love it, but it's starting to fail. I go back to the shop and the thing just works like normal, come back home... brush and leds fails periodically. So annoying. I also own a lot of supossed 25.000 hours-of-life Leds, that failed after 1-2 years of incidental use. Also annoyes the sh** out of me.
  • bayindirh 4y ago
    > I also own a lot of supossed 25.000 hours-of-life Leds, that failed after 1-2 years of incidental use. Also annoyes the sh* out of me. Of all the compact florescent and LED bulbs I have bought, I has died because of a faulty component prematurely, and one has a whining driver. Other than that I failed to reach end of life of any of them. So, I never bought the second round because of that. Oh, I killed a couple of CFLs because of heat, possibly.
  • doubled112 4y ago
    Speaking of vacuums, I bought a $70 upright Bissell 10+ years ago now. It is one of my examples of "win some, lose some" in products, and how high prices don't mean quality or durability. I've replaced the belt once. With the amount of hair I pulled out of the beater bar at the same time, I'm not sure the belt was the cause. Works as well as the day we brought it home.
  • Jupe 4y ago
    LED's will last 25,000 hours. The drivers (the components that convert AC to the required DC, at a constant/steady rate) however, apparently die long before the actual LED does. I've replaced many so far. It's not hard if you can use a soldering iron (and the light in question supports it). If your LEDs are blinking, that's a sure-fire sign that the driver is bad (not the LED). And, from my experience, it's probably the battery that's failing in your cordless vac.
    • teekert 4y ago
      It keeps the vacuum, it's really the brush head with the rotating brush and leds that fails periodically. Feel like as I move some conctact are broken and restored.
• julianlam 4y ago
  I have empathize with the author's plight, but I don't have much sympathy for him buying multiple coffee grinders and throwing them all out because he bought cheap ones. > I can’t say the same about my coffee grinders. I use the plural because I’ve owned a lot of them, all bought in their original packaging and dead within a year. They’re good ones, supposedly, with burrs not blades, but they stop performing before long, ending their long journeys from overseas factories in unmarked graves in my local Montana landfill. A Baratza encore will last literally forever, and if it doesn't, you can replace everything in it.
  • loganwedwards 4y ago
    I have the exact same sentiment when it comes to the Baratza line of products. I have the Preciso, which is similar to the Encore. I have rebuilt parts of it twice and you could build a unit from parts if so desired. In fact, they should consider offering DIY editions ala Frame.work for enthusiasts.
  • JoeAltmaier 4y ago
    The existence of a Cadillac product doesn't refute the proliferation of absolute crap. Somebody sells a coffee grinder, it should grind coffee for years. No exceptions.
    • darkwater 4y ago
      At which price point?
    • julianlam 4y ago
      That's the thing, the Baratza Encore is decidedly not a Cadillac product. It is an entry level grinder. It's just not a "grinder shaped object"
• agotterer 4y ago
  I echo the sentiment of this article. Im nearly 40 and for most of my adult life I’ve found that most things are frustrating to use, have unnecessary tech bolted on (and that’s coming from a technologist), and in many ways barely work. My fancy Bosch dishwasher can’t clean a dish if there’s a tiny bit of food on it. My GE dryer takes two cycles and at least 1.5 hrs to dry some cotton clothes. Don’t get me started on Bluetooth headphones. My coded garage opener takes 3 or 4 attempts each time because I guess the button push don’t register? When I want to watch TV sometimes I need to sit through a system upgrade which means I have to wait to watch. My town voted that cell phone towers are ugly, so there’s basically no cell service anywhere and most calls have between 1 and 5 drops (I live on Long Island, not in rural America). Every year there’s at least $1-3k of maintenance on my 4 year old “luxury” car. My smart lock works well as long as my fingers are perfectly dry and perfectly aligned. I replace my towels once every year or two because they completely fall apart. My “learning thermostat” doesn’t seem to learn anything even though I’ve been setting the temp at the same every night. I replace my jeans at a similar rate to the towels because they get holes in knees and pockets. Holes develop at the same rate in a $25 pair and a $125 pair. Self checkout at every store is a horrendous experience and I’ve never successfully checked out without the support person scanning their badge to fix some absurd error, like the weight of the item placed on the bagging area scale not being the weight the machine expects it to be.
  • TN1ck 4y ago
    Modern dishwashers should be able to clean basically anything, most often when they don’t perform well, something got stuck in the water dispensers and there is just not enough water reaching the dishes (this will rarely create an error code). At least that’s my experience and I abuse those machines quite a bit in terms of what I put in there.
    • onli 4y ago
      There was a technology connection video about that - dishwashers are still good, the tabs are the problem. Use powder and make sure some is available in the first cycle (by putting it outside the container if necessary) and performance will come back.
• Maxburn 4y ago
  The downward spiral of shopping by purchase price. If it can be made cheaper it will sell and here we are. Commercial kitchen equipment is out there and available if you want it, designed to last. It will seriously cost you to get it though.
  • rightbyte 4y ago
    Is it just me getting older or has this trend reversed? I don't the cheap brags anymore when people buy crappy cheap stuff you could hear in the 00s.
    • Maxburn 4y ago
      Perhaps a little, people who knew had higher end options for plenty of things. Now with a inflationary recession ongoing I fear we are back to initial purchase price.
• TrispusAttucks 4y ago
  Tools are no longer tools, but instead toys. Cheap imitations of an artifact from a bygone era. Where playing with it too much or too hard will it break. They're more of a display item than an actual appliance. Only meant for looking at and instilling the idea of a useful tool. But don't dare use it! The reason is producers don't care if it works or not. The product is successful so long as they can trick enough people into buying it. The mental, emotional, and financial exhaustion borders on psychological warfare from foreign advisories. America needs to reboot it's manufacturing base with a focus on absolute best quality hands down, no excuses, survive nuclear winter American made products. Let's break this wasteful Earth destroying, GHG creating cycle of madness!
• cdelsolar 4y ago
  My house came with a large high quality washing machine from the 80s I’m pretty sure, or maybe even earlier. It crapped out at some point last year, and we were about to buy a brand new appliance, but I did some research, got out the multimeter, and was able to diagnose a blown fuse caused by a faulty part (replacing the fuse just blew it out immediately). I ordered the part online and installed it and now the washer has been fine since then. I don’t think this would have been easier with a newer part.
  • vageli 4y ago
    My washer and dryer have the schematics for them inside the button console. I have only had to repair a faulty closed door sensor but it was very simple.
  • TrueGeek 4y ago
    I did this with my washer for years and kept it running until it was 20 years old. One day it broke again and I knew from experience the part that broke would take hours to fix. At the same time Lowes was having a sale where the fancy new units were on sale and included 5 years of 100% paid for labor and parts maintenance. The new washer / dryer wash more clothes at once using less detergent and far less electricity. They're also quieter. Like, a LOT quieter. And they text us when they finish which I thought was silly at first but in practice it means we get more loads done per day. It's been 3 years and we've had to use the Lowes warranty once for a leak. Watching the repairman it seemed like a huge hassle to work on these new machines so I don't see these being fun to own once the 5 year maintenance plan expires. We donated the old washer / dryer to a pet rescue group so hopefully they're still going.
• taldo 4y ago
  Besides echoing the survivorship bias warning in other comments, I'd like to point out that just a bit of skill and will can turn the fate of a lot of this 'crap' around. Dull peeler? Sharpen it. Now you have a sharp peeler that can probably last 10 years with occasional attention. Dead grinders? I'm sure at least one of them could've been fixed and extended its life significantly. Sure, things are getting less and less repairable, but most still can be fixed of some common faults. It just takes a pinch of skill and a bunch of will.
  • jtbayly 4y ago
    We got a hand (immersion) blender. Plastic gear to the metal shaft. Stripped out. Non-repairable. Can’t find one without a plastic gear. Meanwhile, mother-in-law’s is metal and who knows how many years old, still working fine.
    • hammock 4y ago
      Weren’t 3d printers supposed to solve this problem?
      • escapedmoose 4y ago
        Our household has solved several similar problems with our 3D printer.
• collinvandyck76 4y ago
  Under the Christmas tree this year: another Cuisinart electric kettle. Same model as always, this year recommended by wirecutter. They last two to three years and then break in various ways. This is our third one :( My dad gave me the advice "buy cheap now and be guaranteed to buy it again at least once if not more, or wait, save up, and buy the more expensive thing only once" as I was becoming an adult. I've tried to follow that but sadly I don't think the advice really holds anymore.
  • jemmyw 4y ago
    Why do you keep buying the same one?
    • collinvandyck76 4y ago
      Because we really like it, otherwise.
      • nikau 4y ago
        How much is there to like for a kettle - like you put water in, flick a switch, it turns off once boiled. What features keep drawing you back in?
  • feet 4y ago
    Get a Zojirushi water boiler. They're fantastic and high quality, you also don't have to wait for water to heat up every time you want to use it
  • yetihehe 4y ago
    My Tefal kettle is 10 yr old now and I have really hard water. Looks like Tefal still maintains some quality, I've bought a sandwich maker 3yr ago and it still works perfectly, their pans are still top-notch.
  • reallydontask 4y ago
    I've heard it as: buy cheap, buy twice Unfortunately, it seems that now it's: buy expensive, get some shitty cloud enabled feature, still buy twice.
• nicbou 4y ago
  Your experience gets markedly better with a healthy fear of gadgets. Basic vehicles, appliances and tools are seemingly indestructible. Their fancy counterparts find the most creative ways to fall apart.
• cfeduke 4y ago
  The thing in this space that has always bothered me was the simple can opener. (For those not in the US, yes, in the US we still need can openers.) The new ones which can be purchased in the grocery store break within a month or two. I don't even want to think about modern electric openers. I found a used vintage can opener from the 1970s on eBay six years ago and use it practically every day; as it was used it cost less than the shiny new ones in the store. Maybe there are modern high quality non-commercial can openers but they aren't at the grocery store or Pampered Chef or any of the other kitchen appliance stores at the local mall.
  • groovybits 4y ago
    Spot on. Even at the 'nicer' grocery stores in the US, can openers are made of the cheapest materials I've ever seen. At the moment you pick it up, you just know its going to break before a year from now. By now, you'd think we'd have reached a minimum viable quantity of products that have been ubiquitous for so long.
    • eternityforest 4y ago
      In store shopping seems to be a great way to pay more for worse stuff these days.
      • crystaln 4y ago
        As you would expect. You’re paying to support an entire business including retail space rent and utilities, employees, and owners.
      • jollyllama 4y ago
        You get screwed either way. Buy something on amazon and it's quite likely to be just as bad, counterfeit, etc. - how many times have people complained about that?
        • eternityforest 4y ago
          It happens, but it's not common. Amazon lets you get stuff a generation ahead of what's in stores, which often uses better tech and fixes issues in the last generation. When "Cheap crap" first became common 20 years ago stuff got a bit worse, but it seems to be improving.
• chrisweekly 4y ago
  Can anyone recommend a large room humidifier that might actually work reliably (assuming proper care and maintenance, no weirdly hard water) for multiple winter seasons? The last FOUR I bought from diff brands failed either DoA or within a couple weeks. Willing to pay for actual basic quality.
  • cosama 4y ago
    In my opinion there is only one humidifier that is worth the money, the honeywell warm mist humidifier [1]. It works great for us, just put it in a little tray in case it leaks. It also got one of the best written customer reviews on amazon I ever saw [2]. TL;DR, they use it on McMurdo station in Antarctica and love it. Don't buy a ultrasonic humidifiers, they actually reduce the air quality considerably [3], you need to get an evaporative humidifier and frankly there aren't that many. [1] https://www.honeywellstore.com/store/news/honeywell-warm-mist-humidifier-bacteria-free.htm https://www.honeywellstore.com/store/news/honeywell-warm-mis... [2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R911WGTC1OHLL/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00JP6HQBG https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R911WGTC1OHLL/ref... [3] https://learn.kaiterra.com/en/air-academy/humidifiers-cause-poor-air-quality https://learn.kaiterra.com/en/air-academy/humidifiers-cause-...
    • chrisweekly 4y ago
      Thank you so much! Yet more evidence of the HN community's friendly helpfulness.
• assafweinberg 4y ago
  I think the degradation in quality could be a result of advancements in marketing. With such powerful tools, the determining factor for winning products is now marketing not quality. The marketing arms race incentivizes companies to invest more in convincing customers their product is better and invest less in improving their product.
• eternityforest 4y ago
  I just don't see it. Were I to go shopping at wal-mart, and if I didn't understand anything about failure modes, I might, but I find it very easy to find things that last. Partly because out lifestyle now is lighter on things, and we need fewer of them. I don't need a juicer because... I don't juice. Another factor might be that we still have an obsession with "Power". Look at how impact drivers are reviewed, based on how fast they screw some insane fastener most people won't ever need. If consumers prefer and recommended more powerful stuff rather than stuff that's better at protecting itself, stuff is gonna break. My vacuum does shut off if you run over the wrong thing. That's not a case of clogging and choking, that's a sensor detecting that I've given it something it's not meant for, protecting itself. I would take that any day over something that would happily self destruct on something, or even chew up whatever it hit. My Rite in the Rain pen never has issues and very well could last my whole life with no refills. There are bad pens out there, but I have no memory of any time when cheap ballpoints actually worked correctly. I have not had any experience with a new washer or dryer for very long. However, new appliances are lighter, cheaper, and more efficient. If the scrap is recycled, they may well be just as good as old ones in terms of cost and environmental concerns, even if they break faster. There are certain categories of things that may be worse overall, but in general, there's close to nothing I'd prefer the old version of. However, there are probably lots of things where the cheap version now is worse than the old version. But that old version probably cost $40 in today's money and the cheap version cost $20.
  • jtbayly 4y ago
    A broken fridge ruins lots of food, worth lots of money. A broken washing machine or dishwasher can flood your house, costing 10s of thousands of dollars. A broken dryer can burn your house down. And even if some of those aren’t common failure modes (fridge is common), it is incredibly inconvenient and expensive to be without a major appliance for (insert supply chain guesstimate number of) weeks every year or so.
    • eternityforest 4y ago
      I've only personally seen one failure like that, a bad washer flooding a friend's house. I would imagine a heat pump dryer would be very unlikely to burn anything down. It is a really big inconvenience when they go offline, but there are still lots of brands that seem to work fine for 10 to 20 years. I'm surprised ultra high reliability isn't more of a consumer selling point. Refrigerators in particular could do it with a redundant compressor and valves, they could share the evaporator and condensing coils. It's not like fridge compressors cost that much to make. They could even use 2 small ones and run them all the time, so if 1 fails you get half power but it still works. Washers and dryers could do redundancy by selling pairs of identical combo units instead of 1 washer and 1 dryer, but I suppose people don't need to replace both at once very often.
• pmarreck 4y ago
  When everyone is manufacturing crap, there's value in non-cheap, good, honest products. Too bad all of our manufacturing went to China, a culture that has no concept of honesty. https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/in-china-honesty-is-not-the-best-policy https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/in-china-honesty-is-not-th... https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/1879850/chinese-most-dishonest-japanese-and-british-least-study-finds https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/1879850/chinese-most-... I recently replaced a knockoff Leatherman (which of course broke without being old) with a real one. It worked so well, I bought two. https://www.leatherman.com/ https://www.leatherman.com/ I first discovered these when I worked in the USAF in the 90's. They're not cheap, but one should support quality products with your hard earned cash. I also needed to replace my belt recently. Discovered https://ansonbelt.com/ https://ansonbelt.com/. I'm not sure where they're manufactured, but they're quality belts with a unique self-measuring system and a latching mechanism.
• masto 4y ago
  When we got our house 7 years ago, we replaced a bunch of appliances with brand new, modern ones. Fancy French-door Refrigerator: still going strong. I tightened the screw on the freezer handle a couple of times. Cheap fridge in the basement: still going strong, no repairs Washer and dryer: still going strong, no repairs Dishwasher: still going strong. I replaced a dish rack when one of the tines broke. Anecdata, it's fun and useless!
• winReInstall 4y ago
  Would suspcription based applicances be better? Softwar supscription definitely did lead to a quality decline in software, as there is always a channel to fix even the sloppiest of implementations.
  • BlueTemplar 4y ago
    I would say that high speed Internet is responsible for this : much cheaper than having to mail updates on physical storage !
  • Tepix 4y ago
    Juicero you mean? That was a great success... /s
    • docandrew 4y ago
      Funnily enough, Juicero is a great example of a rugged product. It had ridiculously over-engineered mechanicals and a very beefy motor. The whole concept was silly and the business model was ridiculous, but it was built to last!
      • Tepix 4y ago
        Does it even work without a cloud subscription? And doesn't it require a supply of special containers?
        • docandrew 4y ago
          I mean, the whole idea of an internet-connected device to squeeze a juice pouch is silly, and I’m sure the additional DRM makes them worthless, but the mechanical engineering was apparently well-done: https://blog.bolt.io/juicero/ https://blog.bolt.io/juicero/
• logicallee 4y ago
  People are mentioning survivorship bias. (i.e. we notice old products that work well because they're still working, and don't notice the ones that failed since they're in a landfill.) I wonder, could the opposite reason account for all the companies selling crappy products? Could it be that all the companies that made the really high-quality products that last generations died out because they didn't have a sustainable business model? It could be that creating a truly high-value product is expensive and selling one that never needs replacement isn't sustainable. Maybe after a while you run out of customers: the ones that are still happily using the product you specialized in making an expensive high-quality version of for life, just don't have a reason to buy another. Thus perhaps the only companies that survive are the ones who have customers who keep rebuying after their products break. How can customers help e.g. a refrigerator company survive, if they only buy one from them ever?
• mojo74 4y ago
  It's always worth talking to the repairer they send out when something fails. Hopefully they will have seen at it long enough to witness change in the industry. Case in point my washing machine leaked underneath, not all the time, but at one point completely flooded the floor. Talking to the repairer they enlightened me with fact that a container underneath (made of two parts top and bottom) had calcified between the clips that held it together thus forcing it apart because of hard water in our area. This never used to happen in older machines as the part in question was moulded as one piece originally. Money saving was the motive but I failed to to push on this point.
• nosianu 4y ago
  I don't quite know what to say to what I found near the end in this article: > Recently, my wife needed a carrot peeler. She needed one rather quickly. Off to Target. The one she bought (the only one on sale)... I stopped at the phrase "the only one on sale". Inevitably the next part reads: > looked handsome enough, and the brand was one she recognized, but it failed in the useful department, miserably. It wasn’t sharp enough to peel a carrot. Is this deliberate, or did the author not notice a core problem right there, in their own shopping behavior? As for coffee grinders, I've got a Eureka Mignon and machines like that are expected to last a few decades easily, with a little bit of maintenance. If you buy the $99 stuff, well... Especially in the kitchen some good stuff still exists. It's expensive, heavy - and lasts. Unfortunately you won't find those in many of the regular shops. In my city - Nuremberg, Germany - I only see that kind of (expensive) quality in a single specialized store (Kitchen Loesch, https://www.kuechen-loesch.de/ https://www.kuechen-loesch.de/). I myself was not aware of the kinds of good appliances that are still made until I went through the lower levels of that store for the first time. I too only knew the stuff most people know, which does not last long, visible at first glance already, with all the cheap plastics it's made of. Much of the better stuff is heavy and mostly made of metal. Even the hand blenders there almost all cost above 100 Euros, far more than I was used to seeing. On the other hand, those devices looked like they would last for a very long time, not like that shitty plastics Philipps model I own. Unfortunately it's not nearly the same to see pictures online, having the actual appliance right in front of you is very different as far as I can tell after that experience of actually seeing them there. The impression of solidity just does not transmit via some online shopping website picture.
  • walterlb 4y ago
    I noticed the "only one on sale" thing too. I suspect the author meant it was the only one for sale at the store, period, not that it was the only one with a sale/discounted price.
    • nosianu 4y ago
      Ah, true, I hadn't considered that. Now I'm just looking forward to see how more and more ubiquitous AI deals with real world language. When I look up "on sale" I get > 1. offered for purchase. > 2. NORTH AMERICAN - offered for purchase at a reduced price. so I guess I associated a US centric idea with the term, since that is what I'm used to.
• doctorhandshake 4y ago
  The author lost me in the seemingly endless list of poor purchasing decisions. I don’t share their pain because I painstakingly research purchases, giving major weight to indications of durability and solid construction in all things. If you find everything you buy comes apart, but others don’t have that problem, can you be said to be a victim of circumstance?
• ectopod 4y ago
  Pyrex used to be exclusively borosilicate glass but some of their stuff is regular glass now. And as the author discovered, it doesn't like sudden temperature changes.
• sevensor 4y ago
  If you're willing to tolerate not owning things when they're new, survivorship bias can be your friend. I especially recommend saying yes whenever an elderly relative / friend offers you a hand-me-down. You'll get things that are no good, to be sure; sometimes trash survives because people have inexplicably taken delicate care of it for decades. But often, you get things of great utility. Wool army blankets from the 1940s. Brace-and-bit drills. Old sets of Encyclopedia Britannica. A flour sifter. A nightstand. A handmade rug. A shearling coat. A sharp machete. Furthermore, accepting these gifts is an act of love; it tells the giver, "it was not in vain that you cared for this thing you can no longer use."
  • gibspaulding 4y ago
    This is great advice! Over the years, most of the shiny new household goods from our wedding registry have ended up donated or binned, and more and more of what we use every day is either inherited or bought used. Estate sale cast iron cookware and shop tools, inherited fiestaware, utensils, and dining room table, a commercial deep freezer from Alejandro's used appliance store. When inheriting or estate sales aren't an option I've actually been buying a lot of used stuff off of eBay lately. PC's (the trick is to select "no OS included" to find the business ones IT departments are discarding), a label maker you could use as a bludgeon in a pinch, a vintage flannel that's actually wool. I've come to really like second hand. Clothes don't shrink when you wash them, boots are already broken in, and things have generally survived past that first failure spike that weeds out the lemons.
  • phaedrus 4y ago
    I have a set of "spade" drill bits for wood that once belonged to someone's grandfather. The operation of this style of wood drill bit is sometimes jokingly referred to as "slapping chunks of wood off" until a hole appears, and I agree - for the ones sold now. Not these ones. They're noticeably sharper and truer than the ones you find now, more perfectly symmetrical in profile and grind, probably a half-dozen other subtle differences. When you drill a hole with one of these bits, all of the shavings are uniform and the sides of hole aren't ragged. There's less vibration, less heat, more progress.
• somehnacct3757 4y ago
  I just don't see it. My pens and my matchsticks work fine. My gloves are still gloves five winters later. Potato peeler, peels potatoes. I think the author doesn't understand that there's a tier of disposable goods for just about everything and if you don't shop wisely you'll take some of it home. Appliances for example: don't buy them from web pages and don't listen to Wirecutter. This is just letting marketers tell you what to buy. Instead go to a showroom that also repairs appliances. They'll know exactly which contemporary brands are crummy because they'll have been fixing them. Specialty stores will also have the entire price range for the product so you can see what quality costs for that good. Marketers prey on us during times of inflation, making their cheap goods look high end before we adjust to inflated prices. If you've only ever shopped appliances at places like Target, Best Buy, or Home Depot, you may have never seen a high quality appliance in your life. And if a brand you like starts showing up in these stores, run. (Famously, Levi in Walmart.)
  • JoeAltmaier 4y ago
    If only. My three-generation appliance store sold me a fancy dishwasher that wouldn't release soap - the little door jammed against the wire rack in operation, opened a quarter inch and finished with a wad of gummy soap still inside. No way it could ever work. The store claimed it was 'supposed to work that way'. Lame.
    • unregistereddev 4y ago
      I've seen this problem before. While it's not a smart design, it usually works. Your racks are likely not pushed all the way into the dishwasher. It's possibly an installation problem; if the dishwasher is not level, gravity will pull the racks towards the door. Try adjusting the feet under the kickplate to raise the front of the dishwasher.
      • JoeAltmaier 4y ago
        Nah. I returned it, for one that didn't need me to fix it's defects.
  • 4y ago
• JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  Carrot peeler? What nonsense. Back of a knife does a fine job. Still, lots of crappy 'appliances' out there. If the labels aren't peeling or fading, then the knobs come off or there's too many parts to keep track of, and one falls behind something and, well, throw it away now. Our fancy dishwasher had a soap flappy thing in the door. Convenient location! Fill and fold shut and... the manufacturer didn't think beyond that. When in operation it would jam against the wire rack and open about a quarter inch. After each load, a wad of saturated soap paste still inside. Easy to wonder how such comprehensive failure to deliver (any) value can get all the way to a consumer. Is no one in the product process ever trying these things? Even once? Well, off to make coffee in a gadget that has too many buttons, generally just flashes lights when I press one instead of actually doing anything, steams milk listlessly if at all, and is very hard to clean. Marry Christmas!
  • oblio 4y ago
    > Carrot peeler? What nonsense. Back of a knife does a fine job. It does, but it's both slower and less safe than one of these things, if you know how to use it right: https://www.ikea.com/nl/en/p/ikea-365-vaerdefull-potato-peeler-black-30175140/ https://www.ikea.com/nl/en/p/ikea-365-vaerdefull-potato-peel... Personally I'd recommend that style over the "default" peelers that look like this one: https://www.ikea.com/nl/en/p/ikea-365-vaerdefull-peeler-black-00152159/ https://www.ikea.com/nl/en/p/ikea-365-vaerdefull-peeler-blac... The vertical one is much faster.
    • mikestew 4y ago
      The 2nd one is "default"? In the U. S., I don't I've ever seen a peeler that wasn't like your first link. That, or I just never recognized the second link as a peeler. Looks kind of like a cheese slicer to me. :-)
      • oblio 4y ago
        Over here (Europe) the second one is all over the place.
      • 4y ago
• indymike 4y ago
  > Be aware that survivorship bias may fool you when comparing the quality of new and old items. This is true, but there is an area where newer products are not able to live up to older products: repairability. There's far too many products that simple cannot be maintained or repaired - laptop computers from a particularly successful maker of Unix powered machines comes to mind.
• throw827474737 4y ago
  Those articles and our experience about modern obsolescense and optimizing the last cent of products out increase... yet I'm not seeing really the counter trend, but maybe it is yet so hidden I have just not found it? If anyone has.. Why are there no companies claiming robustness / longevity above everything else? Really (my wife might have a say still), I would give a shit about the design and looks of a product if it guaranteed 10/20 years or even lifelong usage, and I would also pay double price at least for true guaranteed and proven quality. And also why are not more test reviews / magazines focusing more on this aspect? I barely find anything about that. (Yeah, I know one part to this is you will often only find out after 10 years..) But still, it seems so many peope would be interested in such products, longevity, repairability.. but from multisockets over fridges to cars, every company is just releasing a dozen different products a year (and often you cannot even figure out the difference between SuperDuperRaido1080 vs SuperDuperRadio1085+) that will break soon. Besides it just making sense would also be very nice and important ecologically.. but where, how? HELP! I have gone on daylong web/magazine researches for all kinds of products, you get lost in advertisements, and usually you are still disappointed by quality 1 month or latest 3 years down the road :(
• armenlos 4y ago
  In my student home, we own a stubborn cheap, little coffee grinder. I estimate it has grinded over 100kg of coffee beans in over 10 years time. Expected one of there parts to fail: - The motor - The cable - The button - The safety switch that detects the lid I wonder what happened to the employee who designed this grinder. Maybe they got fired because they should have used cheaper components to generate more profit.
  • rightbyte 4y ago
    Retirement? I got a feeling the prior generation or two of engineers had room for more pushback versus crappyness. I.e. could say no and that was it. It could also be the effect of attrition. Mechanical engineers nowadays maybe never have the time to become grinding experts before they switch job.
• pSYoniK 4y ago
  I have most things that are made nowadays. The arguments for the status quo "you're getting it cheaper, it will actually last quite a bit, it's greener" etc are not really valid. Even if an item is cheaper as a one off purchase, if I have to buy 3-4-5-10 more of the same, am I not paying now for the same higher quality product, but in the meantime the waste I generated is there, pilling up somewhere "else" where it doesn't bother my Western sensibilities. The research part doesn't work that well either. I spent days researching a variety of products we have around our house and a bunch of different items a few friends asked me about. It's brutal. Days of reading reviews, days of looking for the faults, days for trying to find the factory that doesn't abuse people or pay them garbage forcing them into slavery. For nothing. Some products work out, some don't, I pay more than the average guy to get maybe an extra year out of the "thing". I used to have a Logitech MX518 (the original one that came out in 2006 if I remember correctly) and it still works. One of my parents is using it. It handled over 5000 games of Warcraft 3, over 4000 games of CS 1.6, easily 2500-3000 games of Dota and about 16 years in total of browsing websites and general usage. I replaced the skates once and that was about it. The new M590 I bought to keep quiet around the house had a faulty left switch within months... It also cost about half, but that would mean it should work... 8ish years then. I had an O'Neill backpack bought in the early 2000s and used it for almost 20 years. It's currently being used by a friend who needed a small and simple backpack. I recommended another backpack to a friend, it fell apart in 10 months after costing 100$+. Twice the price of the O'Neill... I'm tired. I'm tired of having to spend days to figure out if your product will fail within the year. I'm tired of having gone through about 6 milk hand-held frothers until I found a manual one that is a piece of glass and a handle... I had gone through 2 coffee grinders until I found a manual one made out of glass and metal. Just...
• pontifk8r 4y ago
  Our expectations have also changed over the years. Despite the perception of a downward spiral in quality, cars have, in general, become much better. Remember when fuel injection was exotic (well, you probably don't). My first car, a 1971 Plymouth fury, required a special little ritual just to get it started, involving pumping the accelerator a precise number of times, then turning the key. When I started driving it in only it's 7th year of life, nothing smaller than a softball could be put in the trunk, because the thing was seemingly designed to soak up road salt and rot the rear quarter panels, and there were holes that large on both sides of the body work. Have to say that after that, driving a Toyota for the first time in 1985 was... a revelation. Today, cars last longer, have more features. Most econoboxes will make it past 100K miles no problem. But when today's cars break, there's generally no high school shop class knowledge to fall back on to fix the every-day small things, and anything major requires information, tools, and parts that are beyond most consumers. Remember that the people that work for the car repair places probably didn't have vocational courses in high school, either. Modern society's items have been value engineered, and it seems like the operating tolerances are narrower as well. Unless there's aggressive maintenance, today's stuff just breaks vs. limping along at some reduced performance level. And some items that previously were built to allow for maintenance are built for wholesale replacement now instead. It's rare for today's consumers to fix anything, let alone their electronics, but it used to be common for people to try to repair their own TVs by testing and swapping tubes until the 1980s. Of course, before digital TV and cable EVERYONE fiddled with their "sets" to get a good picture. "Snow" and "Rabbit Ears" are not terms associated with TV watching today. I couldn't buy a 40" color TV that spied on my viewing habits in the 90's for the equivalent of today's $299 either. Shop wisely for your kitchen appliances (mixers, toaster, blenders), high-end cutlery, and tools at thrift shops in neighborhoods transitioning from older demographics. Learn how to sharpen knives and maintain stuff. Use all your senses: learn what your major appliances and vehicles sound like when they're operating correctly, and listen to them periodically. Extra squeaks or rumbles when the furnace runs? Maybe a new blower motor is in your future. Notice the refrigerator cycling more frequently? You ARE vacuuming the cooling coils periodically, right? Dishwasher door seem easier to operate? Bet one of your balancing springs has failed. Troubleshooting and maintenance is a life skill. We were fortunate to be able to buy our first "new" house with new everything 8 years ago. Having all-new stuff was great for a while. The gas water heater lasted 5 years. A nephew plumber replaced it for the cost of the new unit (~1K) vs quoted $5K job by plumbing outfit. Took him 4 hours. The expansion tank started to fail two years later; $69 plus a few minutes of labor. The forced-air ducting between 1st and 2nd floor is undersized, so the single-glower furnace is inadequate to keep the house at a consistent temperature. Finally put in a heat pump this year to partially remedy that situation. Original wall timers for various fans failed about every 2-3 years. Choice is replacing the $20 wall timer with now $25 wall timer, or fixing the original electronics ($1 with a replacement part from Digikey). Original washer, a front loader that came with the new home, failed 1 month (yes, 1 month) out of warranty, with a bad trunion. To fix this required a literal complete tear-down and rebuild with the new tub. GE would do nothing other than send free parts. Our trusted appliance guy said he wouldn't do it, because it took too long (8 hours) and was uneconomic. I did it in about seven, but replaced the washer a few years later, since front loaders just don't get clothes as clean.
• gottebp 4y ago
  Breville coffee grinders fall into this category, and were impossible to get OEM internal parts for. When mine failed a few years back, I designed a 3D printed upgrade for the main wear-part in their BCG800XL SmartGrinder and it was not too much extra effort to document it on iFixit[0] with ShapeWays[1] as an easy way to get the part. I think there is a lot of room to do this for all kinds of stuff that would otherwise go to waste, and make a little bit of passive income on the side (enough to cover coffee indefinitely in my case). [0] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/BCG800XL+Grinder+Jamming+due+to+Worn+Impeller/62905 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/BCG800XL+Grinder+Jamming+due+to... [1] https://www.shapeways.com/product/NASLAGCCP/impeller-replacement-for-breville-coffee-grinder https://www.shapeways.com/product/NASLAGCCP/impeller-replace...
  • gibspaulding 4y ago
    Favoriting your comment since I have that grinder. It hasn't failed yet, but this isn't the first time I've heard of that issue. Do you by any chance sell the STL itself for those with access to a printer?
• rajman187 4y ago
  Perhaps the price of globalization, where it’s considerably more profitable to import cheaply produced goods with the consumer happy about lower prices. I assume with inflation taken into account and price of raw materials that juicer from 70 years ago wouldn’t be very affordable for the majority
• crystaln 4y ago
  Pyrex is a great example of the problem here. Original PYREX was borosilicate glass which is extremely resistant to shattering due to temperature differences and therefore excellent for cooking. The brand and reputation of quality was established. Time to profit. The brand was sold and gutted. The material was replaced with cheaper soda lime glass, which if you google “exploding Pyrex” you will discover is dangerously far less resilient to temperature changes. Presumably out of shame the brand changed to pyrex from PYREX except for lab glass which retains the capital letters.
  • bingaling 4y ago
    Yep confirming/restating, for kitchenware, lowercase pyrex == tempered, capital PYREX == borosilicate.
  • kwhitefoot 4y ago
    > Original PYREX was borosilicate glass Generally still is in Europe. For instance this: https://bakerenogkokken.no/borddekking/serveringsskaler/pyrex-cook-freeze-ildfast-form-med-lokkmatboks-15x7-cm-11-l/ https://bakerenogkokken.no/borddekking/serveringsskaler/pyre...
• carapace 4y ago
  > Potemkin pens, mere props. I got a wire cutter/stripper recently that gave me that exact feeling: "This isn't a real wire stripper, it's a non-functional replica." (It's the kind that has a little adjustment screw/slider to set the diameter of the wire you're stripping. Only it's impossible to set the screw correctly because turning it to tighten it forces the slider to shift position. I wrestled with it for an hour and then ordered a different one. The handle plastic is weird too, it feels "icky" somehow. BTW, the new one, which works great, was the same price as the unusable one.) The unusable one is not worth returning. And what are they going to do with it if I did return it? Throw it away? Sell it to someone else? > And the world took the loss. A small one, but they add up. Again, that's exactly how I feel about it. What a waste, to dig up the materials, forge them into this device, send it who knows how far back and forth over the Earth, just so I can throw it back into the Earth because it's not worth fixing it. It's fucking depressing. I've got more anecdotes: a brand new soldering iron that doesn't solder; an aluminum folding beach chair that broke when unfolded for the first time; an air fryer with a custom grill that rusted in less than a year and can't be replaced; etc... As far as I can see, you have to go out of your way to find the manufacturers and retailers that care about quality (and repeat business) and patronize them exclusively. Don't give any more money to the folks who are ripping you off. Instead, reward the folks who are doing the right thing. You're going to pay the overhead anyway either by doing your homework or by throwing away time and money and garbage items.
• Damogran6 4y ago
  I think there are a LOT of societal ills with sending too many people to College...who then get MBAs. You're going to want to use what you earned, right? So you're gonna maximize profit and shareholder value. Individually, none of them are particularly egregous. A little less sugar for your dollar, a sticky subscription on your credit card, A Washing machine that doesn't QUITE live as long as it should. But in aggregate you end up with /gestures broadly at everything.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • inkcapmushroom 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir Those MBA types have been cutting corners on quality for a while...
    • Damogran6 4y ago
      It’s not that it’s been happening, it’s that it’s happening in such volume.
• pharmakom 4y ago
  There are still great products out there, but how can we find them? Reddit was once a strategy, same with Amazon reviews. Sadly it’s a never ending battle against stooge accounts.
• pphysch 4y ago
  What's better than selling a phone to a household of 10 people? Selling 10 phones to a household of 10 people. What's better than selling 10 phones to 10 people? Selling 100 phones to 10 people over 10 years. Planned obsolescence is a necessary technology to ensure the endless growth of revenue, as required by our economic system.
• MarkusWandel 4y ago
  Some things have gotten better, some worse. Current car is at 202,000km and 11 years and essentially nothing has gone wrong with it except normal wear and tear replacement and it isn't even (in this road salt envioronment) noticeably rusty and it's never even had a spark plug out. Try that even 30 years ago. On the other hand, motorized kitchen appliances really seem to be designed to be about 0.0001% better than the absolute minimum reliability requirement, lest a few extra pennies of manufacturing cost be wasted. That said, there are still gems. I have reason to hope that the current version of the Braun hand mixer is as good as my 20+ year one. I've had to open that up to resolder a transistor that had shaken loose due to vibration - design error; this heavy component should have been better anchored - but the mechanicals run as if it was new. One the other hand, the design of Braun food processors leaves me with little confidence in their long-term function. When the delivery guys showed up with the fridge, 17 years ago, they said don't expect much, 10 years maybe. 17 years later the plastic parts on the outside are yellowed and cracked and the door seal is showing its age too, but it still works just fine. And I suspect chest freezers are still as good as they always were i.e. work for many decades (while consuming less power). I'm not hopeful about the replacements for the washing machine (2000ish) and dishwasher (1987ish) when they wear out.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    Speed Queen on the washer will last awhile and parts are plentiful when they do wear out. You can replace the fridge door seal pretty easily, too.
    • thewebcount 4y ago
      Speed Queen washers are all tiny, though. Our current LG (a company I despise, but had the highest CR rating by far), is something like 5 cubic feet. The Speed Queens were all in the 3 cubic feet range. Depending on family size, amount of bedding, etc., something that small can be a real pain to deal with.
      • bombcar 4y ago
        Alliance Laundry is the parent company for speedqueen and they make this too: https://unimac.com/product-type/washer-extractors/ https://unimac.com/product-type/washer-extractors/
• woah 4y ago
  Old man yells at crap
• jackcosgrove 4y ago
  My parents' home has a boiler that dates from 1959. It still works great. Now boilers are well known to be durable, but every HVAC tech I've spoken to has said the new ones aren't expected to last sixty years. Meanwhile a comparable modern gas furnace lasts at best twenty years. I long for the time when I can start buying quality goods that last. As it is with small children a lot of stuff has to be disposable because the kids will destroy it. I'm talking couches, kitchen tables, etc. Small children are incredibly destructive!
• phaedrus 4y ago
  Regarding the short cords on appliances, my mother (retired) has actually taken the time to call up at least one appliance manufacturer and give them an earful about kitchen appliances whose cords don't reach. The manufacturer had the gall to try to tell her this is "what consumers want" and they're saving her the favor of having a cord that could tangle or be dangerous. So her kitchen features appliances plugged into orange extension cords. I had a German-made burr coffee grinder that died after a few months of use. When I went to repair it I found an approximately 2"x3" circuit board packed with components including relays, optoisolators, chips, and capacitors. I replaced that entire board with a single honking big momentary toggle switch.
  • mauvehaus 4y ago
    Modern code actually requires an absurd number of receptacles in kitchens with the express purpose of not requiring extension cords because using an undersized cord is a fire hazard. Unfortunately, appliance manufacturers haven't quite caught on to the fact that kitchen last rather longer than appliances, and so there are a great many kitchens without a ridiculous number of outlets that are home to appliances with too-short cords plugged into extension cords.
  • nikau 4y ago
    I did a similar thing on a vacuum cleaner - funny thing is, it actually performs like the higher end model now - we had a lower end variant and the touchswitch/motor controller actually limited motor power.
• doug_durham 4y ago
  Wow this guy has bad luck. I simply don't have any of the problems he mentions. Stuff rarely breaks. I'm sure that his 70 year old juicer draws about 5 amps, and isn't grounded.
• spfzero 4y ago
  Manufacturers in the "old days" weren't necessarily more virtuous, but they were more constrained; by material and process choices. There weren't the options for a part that would reliably work... for three years and then fail. You had to choose from a hand-full of materials that either worked or did not, and if they worked, they likely would work for a long time. If they didn't, you couldn't even sell the thing. Today there are myriad types of plastics, metal fab processes, treatments, etc. that can be used to build "things". So there are many variables to trade off, and (some) makers will trade off durability and reliability at the drop of a hat for a 0.1% short-term profit advantage. If they even considered those qualities in the initial design.
• rapjr9 4y ago
  Have there been any scientific estimates of how much planned obsolescence costs the world? Planned obsolescence is basically the definition of unsustainable and makes the climate crisis worse in a not-very-visible way. There do seem to be some studies: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=the+cost+of+planned+obsolecence&btnG= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=the+... I had a VW Cabrio and I noticed that they fine tuned the metallurgy; the stock exhaust system was designed to only last one to two years, the brake rotors were designed to fail after 5 years, suspension components, etc. This is very difficult for a customer to assess the quality of, no one can afford a metallurgical analysis of the steel in their car. Even a Consumer Reports type of ratings company can't do that kind of testing. At best, after 5-10 years, people note a particular car is less reliable and has degraded faster than other similar cars, but by then lots of people own the car. That said, sometimes there are good reasons to ensure a product will only last a set number of years, for example if you think safety standards will evolve so that old stuff should be phased out after a time. A car from 1977 won't have air bags, a crash cage, roll bars, and maybe only power "assisted" steering and braking. Businesses often replace some things on a specific schedule whether it appears to need it or not, because they are known to fail after a while and the failure mode causes bigger problems. Maybe some products should have a "replace by" date just like food as a safety measure, sprockets on chain saws for example. Inflation also erodes our perception of the value we should get for a specific price. A $5 manual can opener purchased in 1980 may have lasted 42 years, but if you buy a $5 can opener today it is going to be cheaply made because that $5 opener would actually cost $17.43 today. Some product categories, like large appliances, have obviously degraded in quality though, which suggests silent collusion.