10 ms·

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 k

by 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.
    - yetihehe 4y ago
      Yeah, sometimes there are plastic gears designed in specifically for this, in blenders and kitchen appliances, some lathes even have a set of several copies of one plastic safety gear. But sintered metal gears in planetary gearbox of a cordless screwdriver which fails faster than it's battery (Einhell) - not acceptable.
    - S_A_P 4y ago
      The real crime is that there are only like 5 appliance parts companies that stock parts and they each seem to look at the other companies for what to stock. Meaning, if someone else has it they won’t. But what ever they do stock ends up selling for 500% or more of the wholesale price.
    - blueblob 4y ago
      I had the same gear fail. It's called a worm gear and is, indeed, intended to fail before damaging the other gears. They're much cheaper if you buy a non-oem part. I bought one from amazon for ~10 USD.
      - JKCalhoun 4y ago
        Yeah, this was a time when Amazon was in its infancy. :-(
    - generalpf 4y ago
      A worm gear! It is indeed designed to take the fall so the entire machine doesn't shred itself. I bought an official replacement from KitchenAid for $12 including shipping.
    - mattferderer 4y ago
      > It occurred to me that it was perhaps designed to fail rather than the mixer continuing to break the bones of the person who got their hand caught in the paddle. This is a good call out of potential other reasons an engineer team might make something cheaper & easier to break. It would be awesome to read a summary of the trade-offs the teams discuss in their process.
    - 4y ago
  - jerf 4y ago
    Capitalism is successfully optimizing for what I as a consumer can detect. I am not capable of simply looking at a device and knowing whether the metal is the quality metal it needs to be, or if it is merely some cheap metal that will bend if I breath on it too hard. ($YOU may be. I'm not.) Except that nowadays I tend to just guess the latter and I'm statistically correct anyhow. Superman has a quote about living in a world of cardboard, where he must control his every move lest he rip through everything. I'm beginning to feel that way myself with these consumer products. If you take them even 5% out of spec expect them to catastrophically fail. They'll catastrophically fail even if you use them entirely within spec. I'd happily pay a bit extra for something that wouldn't but there's no way for the manufacturer to successfully convey to me that this is such a thing even if they wanted to. The metaphorical water is so metaphorically muddied that it's just dry dust now anyhow, with fake 5 star reviews and decades of refinement on marketing messages about how this vegetable peeler peels vegetables so well that it will even enhance your marriage prospects.
- eternityforest 4y ago
  Reliability now isn't done with the same methods as it was then. Back then, the good stuff might have been good because the motor was big. The modern good stuff probably has a brushless motor that can prevent stalls. It doesn't matter if it's big or small, the computer won't let it overheat, so they can make it smaller to save money that they can spend on whatever part is the actual failure mode. The trouble is finding manufacturers that actually do that, rather than just using a tiny motor with no computer and plastic gears with no torque sensing. If you design things with old fashioned methods, you need to use old fashioned heavy parts. Nylon gears in contact with ozone, and switches and connectors of all kinds seem to be the problem on everything I've seen. Which is why I always say I would gladly use 10k lines of code to save one moving part or one switch.
  - mikepurvis 4y ago
    100% agree, but I think the issue here comes with a typical phased design process: - Mechanical: "Here's the physical specs, no need to account for A, B, or C, as it's been handled in software" - Electrical: "Here are the physical constraints and electrical spec. No need to account for X, Y, or Z, as it's being handled in software." - Firmware: "You need to handle A, B, C, X, Y, and Z, but if you run out of time or don't have the budget to make up a test rig for validating all those cases are handled correctly, no worries we'll just ship it anyway."
    - eternityforest 4y ago
      The other issue I see is when mechanical and electrical don't actually give firmware the data or control they need. You'll see stuff like a lack of battery level monitoring, or relays without current sensing. I'm not sure why we don't do things the other way, have firmware people present at every step. Some things can't be fixed later. If mechanical puts a weak link gear designed to fail before the motor, firmware might not have enough margin to not wear it out with auto-stop.
      - bumby 4y ago
        Completely anecdotal, but my experience was that a large amount is attributable to systems engineers and project managers not having adequate software background. Invariably, this leads to software rigor being deprioritized or with just little oversight. After all "it's just software"
theK 4y ago
I'm really rooting for getting the onslaught of rubbishware to end but don't see the right to repair laws making a dent there. Those laws are engineered to make it possible to repair complex, expensive things. Dealing with intentionally misengineered things that are trash cheap is a completely different discipline.
- escapedmoose 4y ago
  My partner and I joke that nothing we buy remains unmodified for more than a day. It’s an exaggeration of the truth: that many many of our purchases require some customization before they’re really useful. We’re both the type to research heavily before a purchase, and we’ll gladly spend more for quality. Yet still the manufactured designs never quite meet our standards. We survive comfortably by sharing practical skills in the household: sewing, woodworking, metalworking, electronics, CAD (for 3D printing replacement parts), painting, etc. Products straight from the factory are often substandard, but a good set of tools, library books and tutorials can close the gap to usability if you have the time.
- Gibbon1 4y ago
  My solution is handle this through enforced long warranties. And require muni waste transfer stations to back charge manufacturers for broken appliances under warranty AKA: Your dishwasher dies and you send it to the dump. They'll look it over document the failure and back charge the manufacturer for the retail price.
  - JadeNB 4y ago
    > My solution is handle this through enforced long warranties. And require muni waste transfer stations to back charge manufacturers for broken appliances under warranty. You have given me a new utopian dream. This is a clever solution.
derbOac 4y ago
I used to think if you looked hard enough and researched things, maybe paid more sometimes, you could get around it. I still think that is necessary, but not sufficient. It won't save you; you also need a bit of luck. My biggest bugaboo in this area is with clothes. At some point I started being more careful, but found the published specs won't help because they don't actually tell you everything you need to know, or the company selling them is being defrauded themselves by manufacturers making things out of spec. In many cases too I'm convinced people have lost communal knowledge of what good items look like because theyve never seen them. So, say, they're happy with a sweater that is made out of very poor yarn that obviously won't last because it's warm and has a good zipper. We're at 2/3 now I guess. However, even places like Consumer Reports will say they don't recommend an entire class of appliance, but then proceed to provide ratings, that are ostensibly good. How are those supposed to be interpreted? "None of these are worth buying but they are 95/100 in quality if you take that into account"? No wonder people are confused. I've bought clothes from reputable vendors, with fabric from named mills to specs that should be quality, and found instead the cut was off spec and wouldn't fit. Or something about the fabric just didn't last anyway. It seems like it's always something, like I'm constantly being tricked in some new way once I figure out some other problem. It's such an enormous waste of money, time, and resources.
- datr 4y ago
  I've run into this issue with jeans. They develop holes around the crotch six months after buying a new pair. A decade ago I'd buy jeans and they'd last years. Unfortunately my waist line has since increased and none of those survivors now fit me. I started with Levi 511s and -- when they started failing -- moved to Nudie Jeans (2x price) as they offer free repairs. When I tried to get them repaired though I was told there was a six week waiting time which seemed excessive. Next I went with a local atelier (3x price) figuring if I spent more that would solve the problem but it happened again.
  - robert_foss 4y ago
    I've got several 5-10year old Nudie pairs. Enough of a buffer to get me through 6-12weeks waiting times easily.
darkwater 4y ago
> My jeans are from a Swedish jeans company that offer in-store repairs as long as it's practical. Nudie jeans by any chance?
wonderwonder 4y ago
I ordered a pair of buffalo jeans the other day and they arrived missing a belt loop on the front. Pretty frustrating as I've ordered jeans from this company without issues before this. I generally only have 2 pairs of jeans on hand at any time so my go to brand shipping flawed jeans was a bummer.
- starkd 4y ago
  Maybe its time more people learn how to sew.
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    Maybe, but I would prefer they just sent me a proper pair of jeans. I do agree though, sewing appears to be a dying art in laymen.
  - bsder 4y ago
    Sewing denim, leather, canvas, etc. is generally a pain in the ass. Even old consumer grade machines would have a tough time. You either needed an industrial machine or an old-school treadle machine that you could overpower. What I want is someone that I can pay to sew stuff for me and have it not suck. The problem is that someone who does that is continually having to hunt down new clients since their stuff doesn't fall apart. And they can't charge enough because the crappy stuff is soooo cheap that it sets the floor of the pricing. If we want artisans to make a comeback, we're going to have to help them somehow.
mathattack 4y ago
Quality manufacturing in the Good Ole Days is a myth. The Japanese are our lunch in auto in the 70s due to a lack of Quality. Planned obsolescence is a thing. So is building or making for the short term. There just wasn’t this great era where people made things for the long haul out of pride or something else. People always took the short term view when the market structure or incentives encouraged it.
- bumby 4y ago
  >when the market structure or incentives encouraged it. I think one argument is exactly this. There has been a march towards a market that expects a constant supply of cheap shit. When all the margins have been wrung out of globalization, reduction in quality provides the next mechanism of lowering price. People know where to find $150 denim that lasts, just like in times past. But there has been change in expectations that makes $25 denim the norm.
  - JadeNB 4y ago
    > People know where to find $150 denim that lasts, just like in times past. Do they? There have been times I'm willing to pay whatever needs to be paid for quality items, and I just don't know where to find it. You can find the brands that used to make quality items, selling for the same premium prices, but often they're just selling the same unreliable stuff in slightly spiffier dress.
- RunSet 4y ago
  I distinctly recall the existence of television repair shops, which suggests there was a time when market structure / incentives did not encourage planned obsolescence.
  - eigen 4y ago
    when your $2000 TV breaks in 1985, you get it repaired because the current models cost just as much and are basically indistinguishable. when your $400 TV breaks in 2022, you buy a new one because its relatively inexpensive and you can get a larger one for the same price.
MisterTea 4y ago
> Be aware that survivorship bias may fool you when comparing the quality of new and old items. Indeed. So I skim the article and wind up agreeing with how some things seem to be built to fall apart or under perform (modern HE washers, I'm looking at you). Then I get called to the shop floor to check a machine and the operator, an older gentleman gets to talking with and starts the same conversation! He is in his mid 60's his you'd think he'd go on lamenting the loss of the sturdy goods from his youth but nope! He too said there was plenty of cheap flimsy crap to be had. Though one thing I will say has changed: the ability to repair stuff. Computers stuffed with proprietary code have taken control of even the simplest appliances (washers, stoves, refrigerators). Things that were made from multiple pieces of stamped or cast metal are now made from a single piece of plastic that is less sturdy which melts or deforms under heat (some eventually become brittle and crumble). I can see how it makes things cheaper and easier to make but they don't sell the plastic bits separately requiring me to toss everything over a single broken piece. And even if something is made of metal, the stamping or casting is so thin that it might as well be made of plastic (e.g. the tin foil harbor freight stock carts.) But the retailers and consumers are adjusting to this model: goods are so cheap they are disposable. Don't bother returning it, just toss it. This has lead to people buying new items and tossing them right into the trash because amazon will ship another. Or maybe return the broken item in its place. Or you buy a new item to take a part off and toss it because amazon told you to. Consumers get to keep buying cheap crap and companies keep the money rolling in. This low effort thinking is filling landfills with unused or barely used items at an alarming rate which is a great example of unchecked capitalism. Whats worse is I guarantee you most people could live happily without most of the shit they buy.
- Yeroc 4y ago
  Indeed repairability may have been the biggest change. Major appliances centralize virtually all functions including on one or two main circuit boards including the high-voltage relays which in my experience are very prone to failure (they used to be mounted separately in a different location on older appliances). Those circuit boards typically cost ~1/3 the cost of a new appliance assuming you source and swap it yourself. In conjunction with the decline of repairability in the appliances I think there's a corresponding decline in repair skills among the general population as well.
rzwitserloot 4y ago
The 'plague' - the one that feels utterly needless, is deplorably bad quality crap. The key is that there are 2 completely different things going on and I think it's very bad that we keep conflating the 2: * Bad quality crap, which took shortcuts which impair repairability for no reason other than to save a cent, make it impossible to find replacement parts because it's a fly by night operation that didn't think about it in the slightest, and which in general is going to break down on you within the year. * Devices which are hard to repair. That second category contains a lot of reasons ('save half a cent on a screw' is one of them, as is 'planned obsolescence' / 'make sure our pricey resellers get plenty of work'), but some of those reason are GOOD - such as 'it is a heck of a lot easier to make a robust product if we don't make the battery swappable (e.g., iPhone, which got plenty of flak for this)'. For the first, the only 'good' reason to do that, is to ensure some product is available even to those who have _very_ little to spend, but, [A] environmentally this isn't a good idea, and [B] how 'available' is it when the only category you can buy is dinky crap that doesn't work well and breaks down within 6 months? So how do we get rid of _that_? Right-to-repair laws are barking up an entirely different tree, e.g. fighting the kind of bullshit where a farm tractor manufacturer intentionally makes it impossible to work on computer-guided stuff basically just to be dicks and get more money from their official repair/reseller program. And to a lesser extent, acts where a manufacturer makes a device significantly harder to repair with as only goal to save a cent or two on an errant screw, or cheaper glue or whatever.
taylodl 4y ago
People forget things used to cost a lot of money. I remember when our family bought our first color TV set back in the early 70's. You can buy a 65" HDTV set today for the same amount of money - and that's in today's dollars which are significantly less valuable than the dollars in the early 70's! That TV didn't last 20 years - it was a huge hassle continually testing and replacing tubes. Meanwhile I bought a 55" HDTV almost 20 years ago that's still running fine.
- Fatnino 4y ago
  20 years ago tvs didnt have all manner of "smart" crap stuffed into them. If you buy a TV today there is a good chance much of it will stop working or change for the worse in an overnight update.
- function_seven 4y ago
  I remember asking for a color 13" TV for Christmas back in 1988 I think? For months I would grab the Sunday paper and pull out all the ad inserts looking for the perfect TV. It had to be cheap; I didn't want to ask for anything crazy. I finally found one that was under $200 and showed it to my parents. It was some unknown brand. It wasn't "Cable Ready", and it still had separate tuner knobs for VHF and UHF. I didn't care, main use would be for Nintendo. Parents decided to splurge instead and spent almost $400 on a Toshiba unit with a digital channel display and a remote(!). It also understood cable. I could watch Nick at Nite on it when I went to sleep. $400 for a 13" TV, in 1988. That's $1,000 in today's money. A 75-inch 4K TV. EDIT: For a nostalgia hit, I went searching for it. This is the model they got me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15wiYAEOYAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15wiYAEOYAE
  - listenallyall 4y ago
    > $400 for a 13" TV, in 1988. That's $1,000 in today's money. A 75-inch 4K TV. Those 1980's tvs could display Knight Rider, Miami Vice, The A-Team and Moonlighting natively, without the need for any kind of streaming service.
    - 4y ago
waynesonfire 4y ago
> Swedish jeans company that offer in-store repairs That's cool. But, more than likely it'll be your body that will need the repairs.
waynesonfire 4y ago
> Swedish jeans company that offer in-store repairs That's cool. I like high quality clothing too but noticed as I age that it's my body that needs the repairs. It's been a tight-fitting last couple years and my clothes still have so much life left.
ekianjo 4y ago
> I'm glad that the EU is working hard on right-to-repair laws. The EU will just give fines and nobody will care. Regulation is not the best path here.
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  If you able to tell us that regulation is not the best path perhaps you could enlighten us by telling us what would be better.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    Consumer education is one thing that could work. But I dont claim to have the answer. We know that regulation hardly changes bad behavior.
mattigames 4y ago
I'm willing to bet that the "survivorship bias" of old products narrative is being pushed by modern planned obsolescence companies; back then people were still figuring out how to make a successful company, and many companies believed that if you made a product that lasted forever people will tell their friends and those friends would buy their product and so they would be rewarded for a job well done, now there is not a single company that believes that, the results came in and economically it makes much much more sense to make stuff that breaks after a few years, so no; I don't buy for a second is survivorship bias, at least not in most applications.
schwartzworld 4y ago
For me, it's no replaceable batteries. Anything with an internal battery has a finite span of usefulness. There's no real excuse for making batteries inaccessible, other than forcing people to rebuy. A great example is Tile, little tracking tags for your keys. I bought one, and in a year the battery died, just in time to get an email from the company offering a 10% discount on a new one.

by vages 4y ago

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.
  - yetihehe 4y ago
    Yeah, sometimes there are plastic gears designed in specifically for this, in blenders and kitchen appliances, some lathes even have a set of several copies of one plastic safety gear. But sintered metal gears in planetary gearbox of a cordless screwdriver which fails faster than it's battery (Einhell) - not acceptable.
  - S_A_P 4y ago
    The real crime is that there are only like 5 appliance parts companies that stock parts and they each seem to look at the other companies for what to stock. Meaning, if someone else has it they won’t. But what ever they do stock ends up selling for 500% or more of the wholesale price.
  - blueblob 4y ago
    I had the same gear fail. It's called a worm gear and is, indeed, intended to fail before damaging the other gears. They're much cheaper if you buy a non-oem part. I bought one from amazon for ~10 USD.
    - JKCalhoun 4y ago
      Yeah, this was a time when Amazon was in its infancy. :-(
  - generalpf 4y ago
    A worm gear! It is indeed designed to take the fall so the entire machine doesn't shred itself. I bought an official replacement from KitchenAid for $12 including shipping.
  - mattferderer 4y ago
    > It occurred to me that it was perhaps designed to fail rather than the mixer continuing to break the bones of the person who got their hand caught in the paddle. This is a good call out of potential other reasons an engineer team might make something cheaper & easier to break. It would be awesome to read a summary of the trade-offs the teams discuss in their process.
  - 4y ago
- jerf 4y ago
  Capitalism is successfully optimizing for what I as a consumer can detect. I am not capable of simply looking at a device and knowing whether the metal is the quality metal it needs to be, or if it is merely some cheap metal that will bend if I breath on it too hard. ($YOU may be. I'm not.) Except that nowadays I tend to just guess the latter and I'm statistically correct anyhow. Superman has a quote about living in a world of cardboard, where he must control his every move lest he rip through everything. I'm beginning to feel that way myself with these consumer products. If you take them even 5% out of spec expect them to catastrophically fail. They'll catastrophically fail even if you use them entirely within spec. I'd happily pay a bit extra for something that wouldn't but there's no way for the manufacturer to successfully convey to me that this is such a thing even if they wanted to. The metaphorical water is so metaphorically muddied that it's just dry dust now anyhow, with fake 5 star reviews and decades of refinement on marketing messages about how this vegetable peeler peels vegetables so well that it will even enhance your marriage prospects.
eternityforest 4y ago
Reliability now isn't done with the same methods as it was then. Back then, the good stuff might have been good because the motor was big. The modern good stuff probably has a brushless motor that can prevent stalls. It doesn't matter if it's big or small, the computer won't let it overheat, so they can make it smaller to save money that they can spend on whatever part is the actual failure mode. The trouble is finding manufacturers that actually do that, rather than just using a tiny motor with no computer and plastic gears with no torque sensing. If you design things with old fashioned methods, you need to use old fashioned heavy parts. Nylon gears in contact with ozone, and switches and connectors of all kinds seem to be the problem on everything I've seen. Which is why I always say I would gladly use 10k lines of code to save one moving part or one switch.
- mikepurvis 4y ago
  100% agree, but I think the issue here comes with a typical phased design process: - Mechanical: "Here's the physical specs, no need to account for A, B, or C, as it's been handled in software" - Electrical: "Here are the physical constraints and electrical spec. No need to account for X, Y, or Z, as it's being handled in software." - Firmware: "You need to handle A, B, C, X, Y, and Z, but if you run out of time or don't have the budget to make up a test rig for validating all those cases are handled correctly, no worries we'll just ship it anyway."
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    The other issue I see is when mechanical and electrical don't actually give firmware the data or control they need. You'll see stuff like a lack of battery level monitoring, or relays without current sensing. I'm not sure why we don't do things the other way, have firmware people present at every step. Some things can't be fixed later. If mechanical puts a weak link gear designed to fail before the motor, firmware might not have enough margin to not wear it out with auto-stop.
    - bumby 4y ago
      Completely anecdotal, but my experience was that a large amount is attributable to systems engineers and project managers not having adequate software background. Invariably, this leads to software rigor being deprioritized or with just little oversight. After all "it's just software"

theK 4y ago

I'm really rooting for getting the onslaught of rubbishware to end but don't see the right to repair laws making a dent there. Those laws are engineered to make it possible to repair complex, expensive things. Dealing with intentionally misengineered things that are trash cheap is a completely different discipline.

escapedmoose 4y ago
My partner and I joke that nothing we buy remains unmodified for more than a day. It’s an exaggeration of the truth: that many many of our purchases require some customization before they’re really useful. We’re both the type to research heavily before a purchase, and we’ll gladly spend more for quality. Yet still the manufactured designs never quite meet our standards. We survive comfortably by sharing practical skills in the household: sewing, woodworking, metalworking, electronics, CAD (for 3D printing replacement parts), painting, etc. Products straight from the factory are often substandard, but a good set of tools, library books and tutorials can close the gap to usability if you have the time.
Gibbon1 4y ago
My solution is handle this through enforced long warranties. And require muni waste transfer stations to back charge manufacturers for broken appliances under warranty AKA: Your dishwasher dies and you send it to the dump. They'll look it over document the failure and back charge the manufacturer for the retail price.
- JadeNB 4y ago
  > My solution is handle this through enforced long warranties. And require muni waste transfer stations to back charge manufacturers for broken appliances under warranty. You have given me a new utopian dream. This is a clever solution.

derbOac 4y ago

I used to think if you looked hard enough and researched things, maybe paid more sometimes, you could get around it. I still think that is necessary, but not sufficient. It won't save you; you also need a bit of luck. My biggest bugaboo in this area is with clothes. At some point I started being more careful, but found the published specs won't help because they don't actually tell you everything you need to know, or the company selling them is being defrauded themselves by manufacturers making things out of spec. In many cases too I'm convinced people have lost communal knowledge of what good items look like because theyve never seen them. So, say, they're happy with a sweater that is made out of very poor yarn that obviously won't last because it's warm and has a good zipper. We're at 2/3 now I guess. However, even places like Consumer Reports will say they don't recommend an entire class of appliance, but then proceed to provide ratings, that are ostensibly good. How are those supposed to be interpreted? "None of these are worth buying but they are 95/100 in quality if you take that into account"? No wonder people are confused. I've bought clothes from reputable vendors, with fabric from named mills to specs that should be quality, and found instead the cut was off spec and wouldn't fit. Or something about the fabric just didn't last anyway. It seems like it's always something, like I'm constantly being tricked in some new way once I figure out some other problem. It's such an enormous waste of money, time, and resources.

datr 4y ago
I've run into this issue with jeans. They develop holes around the crotch six months after buying a new pair. A decade ago I'd buy jeans and they'd last years. Unfortunately my waist line has since increased and none of those survivors now fit me. I started with Levi 511s and -- when they started failing -- moved to Nudie Jeans (2x price) as they offer free repairs. When I tried to get them repaired though I was told there was a six week waiting time which seemed excessive. Next I went with a local atelier (3x price) figuring if I spent more that would solve the problem but it happened again.
- robert_foss 4y ago
  I've got several 5-10year old Nudie pairs. Enough of a buffer to get me through 6-12weeks waiting times easily.

darkwater 4y ago

> My jeans are from a Swedish jeans company that offer in-store repairs as long as it's practical. Nudie jeans by any chance?

wonderwonder 4y ago

I ordered a pair of buffalo jeans the other day and they arrived missing a belt loop on the front. Pretty frustrating as I've ordered jeans from this company without issues before this. I generally only have 2 pairs of jeans on hand at any time so my go to brand shipping flawed jeans was a bummer.

starkd 4y ago
Maybe its time more people learn how to sew.
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  Maybe, but I would prefer they just sent me a proper pair of jeans. I do agree though, sewing appears to be a dying art in laymen.
- bsder 4y ago
  Sewing denim, leather, canvas, etc. is generally a pain in the ass. Even old consumer grade machines would have a tough time. You either needed an industrial machine or an old-school treadle machine that you could overpower. What I want is someone that I can pay to sew stuff for me and have it not suck. The problem is that someone who does that is continually having to hunt down new clients since their stuff doesn't fall apart. And they can't charge enough because the crappy stuff is soooo cheap that it sets the floor of the pricing. If we want artisans to make a comeback, we're going to have to help them somehow.

mathattack 4y ago

Quality manufacturing in the Good Ole Days is a myth. The Japanese are our lunch in auto in the 70s due to a lack of Quality. Planned obsolescence is a thing. So is building or making for the short term. There just wasn’t this great era where people made things for the long haul out of pride or something else. People always took the short term view when the market structure or incentives encouraged it.

bumby 4y ago
>when the market structure or incentives encouraged it. I think one argument is exactly this. There has been a march towards a market that expects a constant supply of cheap shit. When all the margins have been wrung out of globalization, reduction in quality provides the next mechanism of lowering price. People know where to find $150 denim that lasts, just like in times past. But there has been change in expectations that makes $25 denim the norm.
- JadeNB 4y ago
  > People know where to find $150 denim that lasts, just like in times past. Do they? There have been times I'm willing to pay whatever needs to be paid for quality items, and I just don't know where to find it. You can find the brands that used to make quality items, selling for the same premium prices, but often they're just selling the same unreliable stuff in slightly spiffier dress.
RunSet 4y ago
I distinctly recall the existence of television repair shops, which suggests there was a time when market structure / incentives did not encourage planned obsolescence.
- eigen 4y ago
  when your $2000 TV breaks in 1985, you get it repaired because the current models cost just as much and are basically indistinguishable. when your $400 TV breaks in 2022, you buy a new one because its relatively inexpensive and you can get a larger one for the same price.

MisterTea 4y ago

> Be aware that survivorship bias may fool you when comparing the quality of new and old items. Indeed. So I skim the article and wind up agreeing with how some things seem to be built to fall apart or under perform (modern HE washers, I'm looking at you). Then I get called to the shop floor to check a machine and the operator, an older gentleman gets to talking with and starts the same conversation! He is in his mid 60's his you'd think he'd go on lamenting the loss of the sturdy goods from his youth but nope! He too said there was plenty of cheap flimsy crap to be had. Though one thing I will say has changed: the ability to repair stuff. Computers stuffed with proprietary code have taken control of even the simplest appliances (washers, stoves, refrigerators). Things that were made from multiple pieces of stamped or cast metal are now made from a single piece of plastic that is less sturdy which melts or deforms under heat (some eventually become brittle and crumble). I can see how it makes things cheaper and easier to make but they don't sell the plastic bits separately requiring me to toss everything over a single broken piece. And even if something is made of metal, the stamping or casting is so thin that it might as well be made of plastic (e.g. the tin foil harbor freight stock carts.) But the retailers and consumers are adjusting to this model: goods are so cheap they are disposable. Don't bother returning it, just toss it. This has lead to people buying new items and tossing them right into the trash because amazon will ship another. Or maybe return the broken item in its place. Or you buy a new item to take a part off and toss it because amazon told you to. Consumers get to keep buying cheap crap and companies keep the money rolling in. This low effort thinking is filling landfills with unused or barely used items at an alarming rate which is a great example of unchecked capitalism. Whats worse is I guarantee you most people could live happily without most of the shit they buy.

Yeroc 4y ago
Indeed repairability may have been the biggest change. Major appliances centralize virtually all functions including on one or two main circuit boards including the high-voltage relays which in my experience are very prone to failure (they used to be mounted separately in a different location on older appliances). Those circuit boards typically cost ~1/3 the cost of a new appliance assuming you source and swap it yourself. In conjunction with the decline of repairability in the appliances I think there's a corresponding decline in repair skills among the general population as well.

rzwitserloot 4y ago

The 'plague' - the one that feels utterly needless, is deplorably bad quality crap. The key is that there are 2 completely different things going on and I think it's very bad that we keep conflating the 2: * Bad quality crap, which took shortcuts which impair repairability for no reason other than to save a cent, make it impossible to find replacement parts because it's a fly by night operation that didn't think about it in the slightest, and which in general is going to break down on you within the year. * Devices which are hard to repair. That second category contains a lot of reasons ('save half a cent on a screw' is one of them, as is 'planned obsolescence' / 'make sure our pricey resellers get plenty of work'), but some of those reason are GOOD - such as 'it is a heck of a lot easier to make a robust product if we don't make the battery swappable (e.g., iPhone, which got plenty of flak for this)'. For the first, the only 'good' reason to do that, is to ensure some product is available even to those who have _very_ little to spend, but, [A] environmentally this isn't a good idea, and [B] how 'available' is it when the only category you can buy is dinky crap that doesn't work well and breaks down within 6 months? So how do we get rid of _that_? Right-to-repair laws are barking up an entirely different tree, e.g. fighting the kind of bullshit where a farm tractor manufacturer intentionally makes it impossible to work on computer-guided stuff basically just to be dicks and get more money from their official repair/reseller program. And to a lesser extent, acts where a manufacturer makes a device significantly harder to repair with as only goal to save a cent or two on an errant screw, or cheaper glue or whatever.

taylodl 4y ago

People forget things used to cost a lot of money. I remember when our family bought our first color TV set back in the early 70's. You can buy a 65" HDTV set today for the same amount of money - and that's in today's dollars which are significantly less valuable than the dollars in the early 70's! That TV didn't last 20 years - it was a huge hassle continually testing and replacing tubes. Meanwhile I bought a 55" HDTV almost 20 years ago that's still running fine.

Fatnino 4y ago
20 years ago tvs didnt have all manner of "smart" crap stuffed into them. If you buy a TV today there is a good chance much of it will stop working or change for the worse in an overnight update.
function_seven 4y ago
I remember asking for a color 13" TV for Christmas back in 1988 I think? For months I would grab the Sunday paper and pull out all the ad inserts looking for the perfect TV. It had to be cheap; I didn't want to ask for anything crazy. I finally found one that was under $200 and showed it to my parents. It was some unknown brand. It wasn't "Cable Ready", and it still had separate tuner knobs for VHF and UHF. I didn't care, main use would be for Nintendo. Parents decided to splurge instead and spent almost $400 on a Toshiba unit with a digital channel display and a remote(!). It also understood cable. I could watch Nick at Nite on it when I went to sleep. $400 for a 13" TV, in 1988. That's $1,000 in today's money. A 75-inch 4K TV. EDIT: For a nostalgia hit, I went searching for it. This is the model they got me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15wiYAEOYAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15wiYAEOYAE
- listenallyall 4y ago
  > $400 for a 13" TV, in 1988. That's $1,000 in today's money. A 75-inch 4K TV. Those 1980's tvs could display Knight Rider, Miami Vice, The A-Team and Moonlighting natively, without the need for any kind of streaming service.
  - 4y ago

waynesonfire 4y ago

> Swedish jeans company that offer in-store repairs That's cool. But, more than likely it'll be your body that will need the repairs.

waynesonfire 4y ago

> Swedish jeans company that offer in-store repairs That's cool. I like high quality clothing too but noticed as I age that it's my body that needs the repairs. It's been a tight-fitting last couple years and my clothes still have so much life left.

ekianjo 4y ago

> I'm glad that the EU is working hard on right-to-repair laws. The EU will just give fines and nobody will care. Regulation is not the best path here.

kwhitefoot 4y ago
If you able to tell us that regulation is not the best path perhaps you could enlighten us by telling us what would be better.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  Consumer education is one thing that could work. But I dont claim to have the answer. We know that regulation hardly changes bad behavior.

mattigames 4y ago

I'm willing to bet that the "survivorship bias" of old products narrative is being pushed by modern planned obsolescence companies; back then people were still figuring out how to make a successful company, and many companies believed that if you made a product that lasted forever people will tell their friends and those friends would buy their product and so they would be rewarded for a job well done, now there is not a single company that believes that, the results came in and economically it makes much much more sense to make stuff that breaks after a few years, so no; I don't buy for a second is survivorship bias, at least not in most applications.

schwartzworld 4y ago

For me, it's no replaceable batteries. Anything with an internal battery has a finite span of usefulness. There's no real excuse for making batteries inaccessible, other than forcing people to rebuy. A great example is Tile, little tracking tags for your keys. I bought one, and in a year the battery died, just in time to get an email from the company offering a 10% discount on a new one.