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planned obsolescence (pretty much the cause of so much crap)
Add feature creep, so there’s more things to go wrong and there’s higher chances of something breaking.
We had a fridge that was manufactured in 1998 that lasted until November of last year when it failed irreparably. We replaced it, and 13 months later, 2 days before thanksgiving, our new fridge failed. It was like pulling teeth to get the warranty servicer to get it repaired.
Repairman finally figured out what was wrong with it yesterday, replaced the seized up defroster and it’s running again.
That’s still so ridiculous for an appliance to break that early in its lifetime.
I watched a good video on tool quality.
It basically said the exact same old tool is better than the new tool now. But the new tool is priced much much less. When they compared it to a modern tool that was the same price or less it performed the same or better.
People just want cheap things and companies want to make money. People need to buy quality and companies will get an incentive to build quality.
The problem is it’s not really people’s choice. Companies have gotten very good at disguising quality tradoffs and marketing has got very good at muddying the waters.
Since this is about tools, I’ll bring up Craftsman as an example. For many years, it was a quality brand accessible to homeowners. But as they changed to be cheaper they still marketed themselves as a quality brand and they seemed like the same price. It was only after the brand value was destroyed, that it became clear how “cheap” the tools had become and people were able to make a legitimate decision to move on
Yeah I’m tempted to go for commercial appliances just to ensure I have more dumb options and quality.
Watching Technology Connections recent final (probably not final) video on dishwashers made me really want an open source dishwasher where you can program your own cycles. Maybe over the next few years hacking appliances will become common, doing what Valetudo has done for robot vacuums.
The problem is trust.
People don’t pay for the expensive (allegedly better) stuff because the customer assumes with great chances of being correct that the sales person doesn’t know shit, is lying to their face, and will not honor any of their words after you pay.
Customers don’t trust. So if you know that you are getting crap anyway, you better get cheap crap.
Then the corporate analysis interprets that pattern as “oh, the customer does not value quality, they just want cheap crap, let’s keep doing cheap crap”
