As a Northern European who's been living in USA for a while now, one harsh lesson was that a lot of things are cheap here, but they are often cheap because they

As a Northern European who's been living in USA for a while now, one harsh lesson was that a lot of things are cheap here, but they are often cheap because they're both manufactured cheaply, and horribly designed. Everything here encourages buying crap, using it for at most a year, and then throwing it away. Average-house fixtures in Europe are probably higher quality than average-house fixtures in the US.